CNN washes its hands of Donna

Out, out, damn spot:

As Cortney wrote, CNN was uncomfortable with yet another instance of the interim DNC chair leaking town hall questions to the Clinton campaign. The second instance was revealed thanks to Wikileaks, who found a March 5, 2016 exchange between Brazile and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta a day before the network’s debate in Flint, Michigan. The question is offered word for word. As a result, CNN has cut all ties with Brazile (via CNN):

CNN is "completely uncomfortable" with a former contributor's relationship with the Hillary Clinton campaign and has cut ties with Donna Brazile, a network spokesman said Monday. 

"On October 14th, CNN accepted Donna Brazile’s resignation as a CNN contributor," the network said in a statement.

"CNN never gave Brazile access to any questions, prep material, attendee list, background information or meetings in advance of a town hall or debate," the statement continued. "We are completely uncomfortable with what we have learned about her interactions with the Clinton campaign while she was a CNN contributor." 

[…]

Another email leaked earlier this month appeared to show Brazile sending a town hall question to the Clinton campaign. 

"From time to time I get the questions in advance,” she purportedly wrote Palmieri on March 12. 

This is a rather embarrassing chapter of the Democratic National Committee, who saw their previous chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) get run out of town over email leaks showing that the executive staff at the committee had discussed ways to undermine the Bernie Sanders campaign. Now, we have Brazile tendering her resignation after being exposed for leaking information… to help Clinton’s campaign. Politico added that former CNN contributor and TV One host could be the source of the information.

Dems with a shred of integrity seem to be in short supply these days.

A retired CIA officer's take on Madame BleachBit's conduct

A guy with years of experience in the field says it was criminal as hell:

I have worked in national security my entire life. Most of that has been in the intelligence community surrounded by classified information. For twenty years, I worked undercover in the Central Intelligence Agency, recruiting sources, producing intelligence and running operations. I have a pretty concrete understanding of how classified information is handled and how government communications systems work.

Nobody uses a private email server for official business. Period. Full stop.

The entire notion is, to borrow a phrase from a Clinton campaign official, “insane.” That anyone would presume to be allowed to do so is mind-boggling.

That government officials allowed Hillary Clinton to do so is nauseating.
Classified and unclassified information do not mix. They don’t travel in the same streams through the same pipes. They move in clearly well defined channels so that never the twain shall meet. Mixing them together is unheard of and a major criminal offense.

If you end up with classified information in an unclassified channel, you have done something very wrong and very serious.

Accidentally removing a single classified message from controlled spaces, without any evidence of intent or exposure to hostile forces, can get you fired and cost you your clearance. Repeated instances will land you in prison.
Every hostile intelligence agency on the planet targets senior American officials for collection. The Secretary of State tops the list. Almost anything the Secretary of State had to say about her official duties, her schedule, her mood, her plans for the weekend, would be prized information to adversaries.

It is very difficult, in fact, to think of much of anything that the Secretary of State could be saying in email that we would want hostile forces to know.
As we wait for more information on the latest revelations, let’s quickly note what we already know Hillary Clinton did.

While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton exclusively used a private email address for official business. Instead of using a State Department account, she used a personal email account, housed on a private server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York. The Department of State exercised zero control or oversight in this process. No government security personnel were involved in protecting them.

When the House Select Committee on Benghazi asked to see these emails, the Department of State said they did not have them. Clinton’s lawyers then went through all the emails on her server. They turned over 30,000 emails they decided were work related and deleted all of the rest.

How they made the decision as to which emails to share and which to destroy remains unknown. Active government officials not were involved in this process.
Hillary says she did not use the account to transmit classified information. This has been proven false. The FBI found over 100 messages that contained information that was classified when sent, including numerous email chains at the level of Top Secret/Special Access Programs. They don’t get any more highly classified, it’s the virtual summit of Mt. Everest. One theme pertained to the movement of North Korean nuclear assets obtained via satellite imagery. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out this is extremely sensitive information.

The FBI found another 2,000 messages containing information that should have been classified at the time it was sent. How much more classified information may have been in the tens of thousands of emails, which Clinton’s lawyers erased, is completely unknown.

Hillary Clinton supporters like to ask rhetorically, “Well, what about Colin Powell?” Nice try, but using your own private email address which received 2 emails determined to be classified later, is nothing like deliberately operating a home brewed server, and then see it handle thousands of classified e-mails.
It’s like asking, "what about the guy who received a stolen apple?" while equating his actions to those of bank robbers who stole $10 million.

Add to what Secret Service personnel have said about her flagrant breach of protocol, add to Uranium  One, the Russian-government-backed firm that now owns 20 percent of post-America uranium reserves, add to the lies told to the Benghazi dead's parents, add to the "agreement" with Iran which was a complete farce, and the term "unfit" surely has to arise in the mind.

 

Well, now, how do we get two such different explanations of FBI discontent with director Comey?

Ed Klein at the UK Daily Mail says it's because respect from rank-and-file agents - and Comey's own wife - went seriously south when he didn't recommend that the DoL indict Madame BleachBit:

The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim announced last July that he wouldn't recommend an indictment against Hillary,' said the source, a close friend who has known Comey for nearly two decades, shares family outings with him, and accompanies him to Catholic mass every week.

'Some people, including department heads, stopped talking to Jim, and even ignored his greetings when they passed him in the hall,' said the source. 'They felt that he betrayed them and brought disgrace on the bureau by letting Hillary off with a slap on the wrist.'According to the source, Comey fretted over the problem for months and discussed it at great length with his wife, Patrice. He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents. The letters reminded him every day that morale in the FBI had hit rock bottom.

'He's been ignoring the resignation letters in the hope that he could find a way of remedying the situation,' said the source. 'When new emails that appeared to be related to Hillary's personal email server turned up in a computer used [her close aide] Huma Abedin and [Abedin's disgraced husband,] Anthony Weiner, Comey jumped at the excuse to reopen the investigation.'The people he trusts the most have been the angriest at him,' the source continued. 'And that includes his wife, Pat. She kept urging him to admit that he had been wrong when he refused to press charges against the former secretary of state.

Grant Stern at the Huffington Post, relying in large part on information gleaned from the tweets of Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald,  seems to have this idea that folks at Comery's agency were upset that Comey's detailed outlining of the criminality of Madame BleachBit's behavior but not recommending indictment was the egregious element in the matter and what politicized the department.

LITD's estimation is that Stern has the flimsier case.

Especially given that Klein's account is corroborated by former US attorney Joseph diGenova:

DiGenova made it clear to Breitbart News that he believes that Comey has now painted himself into a corner, primarily by botching the first investigation so thoroughly and now by incurring the wrath of the Clinton campaign, with no clear pre-election exit strategy.

He has obviously succumbed to pressure, he folded like a cheap suit by sending a letter because of the manifestly improper decision that he made originally to not prosecute. He shouldn’t say anything further, in light of his statement. If they conclude the investigation in the next few days and he comes out publicly and says there’s nothing there, I don’t know what will happen inside the Bureau. The place is seething right now. Some of the more senior former FBI officials are absolutely livid.

You may have seen former FBI Assistant Director James Kallstrom’s comments, in which he was just extremely critical of Director Comey. I would hope that we don’t hear anymore from Comey, but at this point he appears to be under some mental stress and he may very well top it and say something additional about it, but then that will show the investigation he’s now conducting was just not through again. So it’s hard to say what he’s gonna do, I think the guy’s in some sort of downwards spiral.

This seems far more plausible and substantiated.

Of plausible explanations and rank demagoguery

David French at NRO articulates the tortured denial of what has transpired so far that is behind the Left's sudden impulse to turn on Comey:

The Clinton campaign is on the attack — and so is virtually every lefty pundit, writer, and activist in America. Comey’s interfering in the election. Comey is irresponsible. Comey is losing his mind. Comey is partisan. Let’s be clear, they’re all saying this without any knowledge at all regarding the content of the emails in question.

To simply assume that they’re no big deal means assuming that a man with a reputation as a straight shooter, but who previously bent over backwards (including applying a made-up legal standard to the facts) to recommend against prosecuting Hillary Clinton, has now suddenly changed his nature and his priorities and is now bending over backwards to try to cripple her before an election — without any meaningful legal foundation.

While anything is possible, this scenario strikes me as most unlikely — and inconsistent with the man’s reputation and past practice. The more likely scenario is that the FBI uncovered emails that raised sufficient alarm to put Comey in a seemingly impossible position. Wait until after the election to disclose this additional investigatory work, and you risk being seen as deliberately withholding material information to assist Hillary Clinton — especially since the additional work was taking place before election day. Disclose, and he faces exactly the firestorm he faces today. At least disclosure reflects the reality as it exists today. 

Indeed. This is a guy who earned the disgust of legions of agents in his own bureau in July when, after an eighteen-minute litany off Madame BleachBit's criminal behavior, ended his press statement by declining to recommend that the DoJ indict her. Are we really to believe he has all along, or even just recently, been a shill for some sort of nefarious right-of-center forces? Doesn't wash.

Russia is calling the shots in Syria

Post-America is not even a significant actor. Russia is assuring that Assad stays in power, and it will be Russia that determines how ISIS is dealt with:

Earlier this month, Russia’s defense ministry, which has reinforced its air defenses in Syria with very modern S-300 and S-400 missiles—although ISIS has no airplanes—bluntly informed the Pentagon that any efforts by the U.S. Air Force to bomb targets in Syria without Moscow’s approval will be met with force, without delay or hesitation.

Moscow is now practically egging on the Americans. And why not? In Syria, Putin has achieved his strategic aims of saving the Assad regime while painting the West as inept villains who back jihadists. President Obama’s confident prediction that Moscow’s Syrian intervention would find the same quagmires his White House has abetted in Iraq and Afghanistan was badly wrong. For the Kremlin, shooting down American warplanes would be the crowning glory of Russia’s Levantine expedition, which has exceeded strategic expectations at limited cost to Moscow.

The Pentagon is well aware that the Russian military would greet a confrontation in Syria with glee. We need to accept strategic reality, now. While many American politicos and foreign policy mavens—importantly Hillary Clinton is among them—advocate a No-Fly Zone in Syria to prevent the Assad regime and its Russian allies from using airpower to kill civilians, the reality is that an NFZ already exists in Syria. It’s supplied by the Russians.

Russia in the Putin era obviously have starkly different geo-strategic interests from those - such as are left after years of planned decline - of post-America. Having solidified its axis with Iran and Assad-ruled Syria greatly enhances its ability to further them.

Yet another level of stink

The post-American regime gives Madame BleachBit's campaign the heads-up about some journalism being practiced - as you know, a no-no in dictatorships.

The State Department tipped the Hillary Clinton campaign off last year that a New York Times reporter was asking questions about Clinton’s emails.

The revelation undermines the State Department’s claims that it has not worked to help Clinton during the ongoing email scandal.

“State just called to tell me that Mike Schmidt seems to have what appear to be summaries of some of the exchanges in the 300 emails the committee has,” Nick Merrill wrote in a March 14, 2015 email.

Schmidt is the Times reporter who broke the news that Clinton used a private email account as secretary of state. The article was published on March 2, 2015. Clinton had turned more than 50,000 emails over to the State Department in Dec. 2014. The State Department then provided around 300 emails to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which was chaired by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.

Your tax dollars at work - undermining the First Amendment.

What would happen now if this were a sane world

As John Kass at the Chicago Tribune says, The Freedom-Haters would demand that Madame BleachBit take herself out of the running:

The best thing would be for Democrats to ask her to step down now. It would be the most responsible thing to do, if the nation were more important to them than power. And the American news media — fairly or not firmly identified in the public mind as Mrs. Clinton's political action committee — should begin demanding it.

But what will Hillary do?

She'll stick and ride this out and turn her anger toward Comey. For Hillary and Bill Clinton, it has always been about power, about the Clinton Restoration and protecting fortunes already made by selling nothing but political influence.

She'll remind the nation that she's a woman and that Donald Trump said terrible things about women. If there is another notorious Trump video to be leaked, the Clintons should probably leak it now. Then her allies in media can talk about misogyny and sexual politics and the headlines can be all about Trump as the boor he is and Hillary as champion of female victims, which she has never been.

Remember that Bill Clinton leveraged the "Year of the Woman." Then he preyed on women in the White House and Hillary protected him. But the political left — most particularly the women of the left — defended him because he promised to protect abortion rights and their other agendas.

If you take a step back from tribal politics, you'll see that Mrs. Clinton has clearly disqualified herself from ever coming near classified information again. If she were a young person straight out of grad school hoping to land a government job, Hillary Clinton would be laughed out of Washington with her record. She'd never be hired.

As secretary of state she kept classified documents on the home-brew server in her basement, which is against the law. She lied about it to the American people. She couldn't remember details dozens of times when questioned by the FBI. Her aides destroyed evidence by BleachBit and hammers. Her husband, Bill, met secretly on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch for about a half-hour, and all they said they talked about was golf and the grandkids.

And there was no prosecution of Hillary.

That isn't merely wrong and unethical. It is poisonous.

Where things go from here will tell us whether this country is truly flatlining.

A wild day at the FBI

Of course, the big stunner is the agency reopening its investigation into Madame Bleachbit's emails.

But this tidbit merits our attention as well:

A conservative-leaning watchdog group sued the FBI Friday after the law enforcement agency ignored a Freedom of Information Act request for records related to the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

Judicial Watch filed a FOIA on July 7 for documents that included "all records related to the meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Bill Clinton on June 27, 2016."

Bill Clinton and Lynch met privately on a Phoenix tarmac in the final days of the email probe after they said their jets unexpectedly landed near each other.

While both parties claimed the meeting was purely social in nature, their visit sparked a fierce backlash among critics who accused Bill Clinton of attempting to tilt the outcome of the investigation in favor of his wife.

Speaking of Loretta Lynch:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is declining to comply with an investigation by leading members of Congress about the Obama administration’s secret efforts to send Iran $1.7 billion in cash earlier this year, prompting accusations that Lynch has “pleaded the Fifth” Amendment to avoid incriminating herself over these payments, according to lawmakers and communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) initially presented Lynch in October with a series of questions about how the cash payment to Iran was approved and delivered.

In an Oct. 24 response, Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik responded on Lynch’s behalf, refusing to answer the questions and informing the lawmakers that they are barred from publicly disclosing any details about the cash payment, which was bound up in a ransom deal aimed at freeing several American hostages from Iran.

So this is the regime that we will be continuing for the next four years at least?

Those Houthis sure have a nose for trouble

And they're ramping up their roles as the agents on the ground in a proxy war with very broad dimensions:

The good news: Iranian-backed Houthi rebels have temporarily stopped firing missiles at US Navy ships off the coast of Yemen. The very, very, very bad news: They’re now aiming them at Mecca.

Good thing this isn’t a volatile region, or something bad might happen. Oh, wait …

Yemen’s Houthi militia launched a ballistic missile toward Mecca on Thursday, the Saudi-led coalition intervening in Yemen’s civil war said on Saudi state news agency SPA.

Coalition forces destroyed the missile 65 km (40 miles) from the holy city without damage and retaliated against the launch site inside Yemen, the statement said. Mecca is home to the most sacred sites in Islam, including the Grand Mosque.

It’s no secret that Iran backs the Houthi rebels in Yemen in an attempt to extend its hegemony in the region. The Saudis have backed the recognized Yemeni government, and the US has backed the Saudis, in part on the basis of the Iranian proxy fight but also because the previous government partnered with us against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Thanks to the civil war in Yemen, AQAP has had plenty of opportunities to expand their footprint locally and to plot terror attacks globally. The Saudis and the US have lots of incentives to reimpose order, but the Iranians have just as many to sow chaos.

And there isn’t much doubt where the Houthis have acquired ballistic missiles, either:

U.S. officials tell NBC News that they believe Iran has supplied weapons to the Houthis in Yemen — including coastal defense cruise missiles like the ones that were fired at US Navy ships earlier this month.

“We believe that Iran is connected to this,” Vice Admiral Kevin Donegan said.

The head of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, who is tasked with securing the waters off of Yemen, disclosed today that the U.S. and partner nations have intercepted five weapons shipments from Iran that were headed to the Houthis in Yemen.

Clearly this fight in Yemen has become a proxy fight between the leading Shi’ite nation of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the most powerful Sunni nation in the region. On top of the sectarian issues, Mecca itself has become a flashpoint in the tensions between the two nations. Five months ago, Iran barred its subjects from making the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina required of every able-bodied Muslim at least once, accusing the Saudis of cyberwar but also of being incompetent stewards of the holy sites. Of course, that argument might lose a little of its moral force with Iranian ballistic missiles being aimed at Mecca.

This represents a serious escalation. If the Houthis are aiming missiles at Mecca, this proxy war steps dangerously close to being an actual war. 

One to watch closely.

Later in the day than ever

As I've said many times since I started this blog in 2012, I'd give anything for a solid sign that its name was becoming obsolete, and that I needed to change it to something along the lines of Bright Beam of Sunlight.

And given the debbie-downer nature of the name and the tag line, I've felt the need to check myself against undue gloominess fairly frequently. Is the general assessment, even among those who share my general orientation, a bit less dark?

No, it seems that sullenness is truly the national mood.

Ironically, the dread about our presidential choices this fall is the only thing that really unifies us. A significant portion of Democrats wishes it had a choice other than Madame BleachBit, and an even bigger swath of the Republican electorate wishes it had an option other than Squirrel-Hair.

But don't take too much solace in this tenuous bond, all you who seek desperately for signs of kumbaya commonality. We're so polarized it's affecting the team ethos in post-America's workplaces:

With the Nov. 8 election just 13 days away, some bosses and employees say they are white-knuckling through, trying to keep things civil and maintain a semblance of productivity.

More than half of the HR professionals surveyed this month by the Society for Human Resource Management said they had observed more hostility among co-workers than in previous election years, up sharply from the one-quarter who reported an uptick in political acrimony in the group’s June survey.
Mr. Raval and others said they expect things to return to normal by the start of the holiday season.
The dispute at FrescoData began a few days before the Sept. 26 presidential debate, when a conversation about the coming face-off turned into a shouting match in the employee kitchen at the company’s Newport Beach, Calif., headquarters. The senior executive “got aggressive and started banging on the table,” and later taunted his colleague on Facebook, Mr. Raval said.
He said the woman took the Facebook posts to FrescoData’s human-resources department, and said the razzing needed to stop.

Mr. Raval had sent his staff a memo in early September forbidding political discussions in the office, but it went unheeded. Now, he has to decide what to do about a veteran executive responsible for much of the company’s sales. 

And, to multiply the fragmentation, the obliteration of modern conservatism is now complete. Hannity is calling Evan McMullin and idiot, and Lou Hobbs is calling him a "globalist" tool of  some "Mormon mafia." Laura Ingraham likewise tries to ascribe a conspiratorial odor to McMullin's poll numbers in Utah.

Ben Shapiro, who has been an admirable outpost of sanity throughout this grim year-plus cycle, tries to find a way that conservatism might repair itself after November 8. He distinguishes, accurately between the reluctant Trump supporters, and those who have been his slavish devotees from the get-go (see above paragraph). If the reluctants can remember what drove them until they capitulated to their self-defined pragmatism, and those still in the #NeverTrump camp can graciously allow them the space to do so, the possibility for reconciliation exists, according to Shapiro:

After the election, which Trump is almost sure to lose, most Republicans will grieve. Never Trumpers will grieve at the lost opportunity to stop Hillary Clinton and at paving her way by nominating a man eminently unfit and pathologically incapable of running even a half-decent campaign; they’ll lament the damage done to the party by spending months snorting at sexual-assault allegations and shrugging at playing footsie with the despicable alt-right. Reluctant Trump voters will grieve at the Trump loss generally — they’ll lament both his win in the primaries and his loss in the general but will generally acknowledge that he failed his supporters.

This will provide the opportunity for a healing — so long as each side recognizes the genuineness of the other side’s grief. Never Trumpers must acknowledge that reluctant Trump voters felt that they had to do what they did and that they do not bear the stain of his sins for taking a lesser-of-two-evils path, even if Never Trumpers believe that was wrong. Reluctant Trump voters must acknowledge that Never Trumpers felt they had to do what they did not out of a misguided attempt to show their moral superiority but out of a real belief that the only way to preserve conservatism and the Republican party was to dissociate from the political electrical fire Trump represented. No conservative or Republican of decency will be celebrating on November 9. Both Never Trumpers and reluctant Trump voters should recognize this.

The only way to rebuild a Republican party based on conservative principle is to acknowledge the good motivations of those who disagree about Trump. The only way to rebuild a Republican party based on conservative principle is to acknowledge the good motives of those who disagree about Trump. 

In his very next paragraph, however, he spells out the skunk at that garden party: the aforementioned Trump-bots, who will persist in thinking they have the moral authority to redefine conservatism itself:

But there’s a real possibility that such a rapprochement won’t happen. That’s because Trump and his campaign deeply desire a civil war. They want reluctant Trump voters to fight with Never Trumpers. They want to excise the conservatives who wouldn’t back Trump, and they want to co-opt the conservatives who would. That’s why in the waning days of the campaign, Trump spends his time ripping Speaker of the House Paul Ryan — a Trump endorser! — and blaming other Republicans for his own failures. Trump’s team, including political arsonists such as former-and-future Breitbart chairman Steve Bannon, want the Right to burn itself out, making way for a resurgent nationalist populism that dispenses with constitutional conservatism altogether. Trump has an active rooting interest in initiating a civil war, for both financial and political gain. He’s planning and promoting that civil war now. To that end, Trump himself stokes the absolute lie that Republicans who won’t vote for him are traitors to conservatism who are hell-bent on belittling those who vote Trump. 

As is customary in any election cycle, because it is intrinsic to the Left's nature, the Left is doing a better job than the Right of smoothing over its panic, despair and bitter divisions. But they are there. Talking-head attempts at spinning the undeniable collapse of the "Affordable" Care Act, as well as the blatant pay-to-play ethos at the Clinton Foundation, as well as the email scandal and the fact that it's obvious that the FBI has been leaned on and compromised, ring hollow.

And, of course, Iran, Russia and China are ascendant on the world stage while post-America recedes into the background, its ostensible interests being scuttled in one hot spot after another.

As late in the day as it is, it affords some kind of faint solace to realize that the principles that constitute real conservatism do not die. If humankind should ever again be interested in giving them a try, they are there for dusting off and being applied.

It will take far more courage in the dystopian scenario into which we are plunging than it would have in times of more comfort, safety and freedom, but no amount of cacophony from the cast of buffoons and tyrants now holding sway can ever make it impossible.

In a sane world, these revelations would destroy the Clinton machine

The explicitness of the pay-to-play ethos is such that there's no plausible spin for it:

The overlap between Hillary Clinton’s State Department, her family’s foundation, and a consulting firm run by members of her inner circle has reaped a windfall for all involved, steering tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton family and generating lucrative contracts for a consulting practice run by a close confidante, an internal memo reveals.

The 2011 memo, authored by Clinton confidante Doug Band, reveals for the first time the precise financial flows between the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors.

The Band memo also provides additional details on the specific relationships between his consulting clients, which include multinational corporations and deep-pocketed foundations, and the Clinton family’s business and charitable efforts.

Band sent the memo to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, then the president of the left-wing Center for American Progress, in a November 2011 email. It was one of thousands released by Wikileaks after hackers believed to be acting in concert with the Russian government breached Podesta’s email account.

At the time the memo was written, Bill Clinton had four existing business “arrangements,” Band wrote. “We secured all of them; and, we have helped manage and maintain all of his for-profit business relationships.”

Since 2001, those relationships netted “more than $30 million for him personally, with $66 million to be paid out over the next nine years,” Band wrote.

Teneo’s work on behalf of the former president included arranging paid speeches at major multinational companies. With the help of Teneo co-founder Declan Kelly, the firm arranged speeches at UBS, Ericson, BHP Billiton, and Barclays that together earned the former president more than $2.5 million.

Ericson also chipped in another $400,000 to cover the cost of a private jet, Band revealed.

Kelly’s involvement with Teneo has recently come under scrutiny due to his overlapping roles at Clinton’s State Department, where he served as an envoy to his native Ireland, and his consulting work for a firm that would later be absorbed by Teneo.

According to an April report in Politico, Clinton’s State Department expanded the use of a designation known as “special government employees” in order to employ Kelly in a role that allowed him to continue operating a private consulting business, and working on behalf of clients that might be affected by State Department policy, while he served in an official government capacity.

When Kelly left his State post in 2011, he and Band co-founded Teneo, which took over work for Kelly’s three existing clients: UBS, Coca-Cola, and Dow Chemical.
Those companies were already donors to the Clinton Foundation, but Band and Kelly worked to dramatically scale up their financial commitments.

“Cognizant of the Foundation’s significant fundraising needs as well my role as the primary fundraiser for the Foundation for the past 11 years, as a partner in Teneo, Mr. Kelley [sic] and I have asked and encouraged our clients to contribute to the Foundation,” Band wrote.

“The foundation donors require significant maintenance to keep them engaged and supportive of the foundation,” he added. “We have sought to make that the case.”
According to Band’s memo, 11 of the firm’s clients have donated six- or seven-figure sums to the foundation.

In many cases, his and Kelly’s work to secure additional commitments from Teneo clients involved leveraging their personal relationships with the Clintons.
Coca-Cola had already contributed $530,000 by the time Hillary Clinton joined the State Department (and given an official post to Kelly). Kelly not only advised the company, he “enjoy[ed] a close relationship with one of the company’s largest shareholders Don Keogh,” Band wrote.

Kelly arranged an introduction between Bill Clinton and CEO Muhtar Kent at Clinton’s DC home in January 2009. By the following year, he had secured $5 million from the company for the foundation.

Dow Chemical paid $75,000 in membership fees for the foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative summit from 2007 to 2009. After Kelly arranged a golf outing between Bill Clinton and CEO Andrew Liveris, the company increased its support nearly ten-fold. It gave more than $700,000 in 2010 and 2011.

Insurance giant Allstate had donated just $15,000 to the foundation by 2009. After Kelly arranged a meeting between Clinton and executive vice president Joan Walker, “his long time friend,” the company gave $250,000 in 2011 alone.

In some cases, Teneo’s business relationship with foundation donors moved in the other direction: Band’s closeness with the Clintons gave him access to donors that he then leveraged into contracts for his firm.

By 2011, for-profit education company Laureate International Universities had donated about $1.35 million to the foundation. According to Band, “that evolved into a personal advisory services business relationship for President Clinton. I have managed this relations [sic] and, since 2011, Teneo partners have helped manage this relationship.”

Laureate paid Clinton $3.5 million annually to serve as its “honorary chairman,” according to Band. While Hillary Clinton led the State Department, the International Finance Corporation, an arm of the World Bank, awarded millions of dollars in grant money to a nonprofit chaired by Laureate’s chief executive.

Will this be the lead story on any major-network newscast this evening?

 

Maybe this inches us closer to an understanding of just how the hell the FBI got politicized

Prominent Freedom-Hater Terry McAuliffe is involved. Surprised?

This week the Journal revealed that Clinton crony Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe— no stranger to suspicious fund-raising irregularities — funneled more than half a million dollars to the unsuccessful state senate campaign of the wife of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe, whom the Journal describes as FBI Director James Comey's "right-hand man," was deeply involved in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server — an investigation that found Mrs. Clinton in clear violation of the law but unindictable because... well, just because. Fortunately, Mr. McCabe has investigated himself and found himself completely innocent of any wrongdoing!

Let's keep digging, everybody. The clock is ticking. All this investigating comes to a screaming halt if Madame BleachBit succeeds the Most Equal Comrade as dictator of post-America.

"We need to clean this up"

I doubt if this post is the first you've heard about the latest development in the Clinton machine / Freedom-Hater cabal email scandal. I know for a fact this isn't the first report about it to use the Podesta quote as a title.

But it needs to be disseminated as widely and plainly as possible.

The upper echelons of Freedom-Hater-dom are in a panic about the extent and brazenness of their lies being evident to all and any who care to look.

In a March 2015 interview, President Obama said that he had learned about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”
But that assertion concerned aides of Mrs. Clinton, who knew that the president himself had received emails from the private address, according to a hacked email made public on Tuesday by WikiLeaks.
“We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov,” Cheryl D. Mills, a top aide, wrote to John D. Podesta, another senior adviser, on March 7, 2015.
Two days later, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, tried to clarify the president’s remarks, saying that he had, in fact, exchanged emails with Mrs. Clinton through her private account. But Mr. Earnest suggested that the president had no idea the emails could be a problem, because he had relied on Mrs. Clinton to make sure that using a private account did not break any laws.
“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address — he did — but he was not aware of the details of how that email address and server had been set up, or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act,” Mr. Earnest said on March 9.
For Mrs. Clinton, the private email account to conduct State Department business has been a constant source of criticism during her presidential campaign, prompting a series of explanations and apologies from her and her aides, and even an F.B.I. investigation.
The email exchange made public on Tuesday highlighted how the issue was quickly viewed with deep concern not only for Mrs. Clinton, but also for her political ally and former boss, the president.

Do you feel secure having this bunch responsible for this nation's well-being?

Let's check in with the "A"CA - today's edition

Like all socialistic schemes, it's losing money and scrambling to make up the shortfall on the backs of the cattle-masses that the Most Equal Comrade lied to:

The Obama administration confirmed Monday that Obamacare prices are going up sharply next year, with average rate hikes above 20 percent in the 39 states using the federal exchange. From the Associated Press:

Before taxpayer-provided subsidies, premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase an average of 25 percent across the 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services. Some states will see much bigger jumps, others less.

Moreover, about 1 in 5 consumers will only have plans from a single insurer to pick from, after major national carriers such as UnitedHealth Group, Humana and Aetna scaled back their roles.

“Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period,” said Larry Levitt, who tracks the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Despite the shockingly bad news, the AP can’t resist turning this into a ‘Republicans pounce’ story. The 5th paragraph begins, “Republicans will pounce on the numbers as confirmation that insurance markets created by the 2010 health overhaul are on the verge of collapsing in a ‘death spiral.'”

Obamacare proponents are fond of saying that the big price hikes won’t affect most customers. And so you get paragraphs like this one from CNN’s report on the price hikes:

Most consumers, however, are shielded from these price hikes, especially if they return to the exchanges to shop after enrollment opens Nov. 1. Some 85% of Obamacare enrollees receive federal subsidies, which can lower their premium to less than 10% of their income.

That 85% statistic is intentionally misleading as it only includes people buying insurance plans on the exchange. But millions of people who aren’t eligible for subsidies buy the same plans off the exchange. As the AP points out, “an estimated 5 million to 7 million people are either not eligible for the income-based assistance, or they buy individual policies outside of the health law’s markets, where the subsidies are not available.” So it’s not true that 85% of people buying these plans will be shielded from the double digit premium hikes and that may indeed be reason to suspect a death spiral (or Zombie spiral) in our future.

And even if you think you are unaffected by the increase, remember, you're not just a health insurance consumer, you're a taxpayer.

LITD's first law of economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

Madame BleachBit's greatest spits

Deroy Murdock at NRO runs down some of the more notable instances of BB's abuse of those in positions of service to her:

“I’m not voting for Clinton,” Air Force Staff Sergeant Eric Bonner posted on Facebook in July.

“It’s because she actually talked to me once. Almost a sentence,” wrote the Air Force K-9 handler. “I got to do a few details involving Distinguished Visitors.”

“One of my last details was for Hillary when she was Secretary of State,” Bonner continued. “I helped with sweeps of her DV quarters and staff vehicles. Her words to me?”

According to Bonner, Clinton told him, “Get that f***ing dog away from me.”

“Then she turns to her security detail and berates them up and down about why that animal was in her quarters,” Bonner added. “For the next 20 minutes, while I sit there waiting to be released, she lays into her detail, slamming the door in their faces when she’s done. The Detail lead walks over, apologizes, and releases me. I apologize to him for getting him in trouble. His words, ‘Happens every day, Brother.’”

“Hillary doesn’t care about anyone but Hillary.”

“Stay the f*** back, stay the f*** away from me!” the then-–First Lady screamed at her Secret Service agents. “Don’t come within ten yards of me, or else! Just f***ing do as I say, okay!!?” Clinton demanded, according to former FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s Unlimited Access, page 139.

“If you want to remain on this detail, get your f***ing ass over here and grab those bags!” Hillary yelled at a Secret Service agent, as Joyce Milton reported in The First Partner, page 259. The officer explained in vain that he preferred to keep his hands free, in case a threat arose.

“Good morning, ma’am,” a uniformed Secret Service officer once greeted Hillary Clinton.

“F*** off!” she replied, as Ronald Kessler documented in First Family Detail, page 16.

“Put this back on the ground!” Hillary Clinton screamed at the pilot of presidential helicopter Marine One. “I left my sunglasses in the limo. I need my sunglasses! We need to go back!” Clinton so abused the chopper’s crew that they christened it Broomstick One.

Also in Dereliction of Duty, its author — Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson (Ret.), who carried the “nuclear football” — recalled hearing “volleys of expletives” erupting from Hillary’s mouth. He also lamented “the Nazi-like edge that emerged when she was around.”

“Where is the goddam f***ing flag? I want the goddam f***ing flag up every f***ing morning at f***ing sunrise,” Hillary snapped at state trooper Larry Patterson at the Arkansas governor’s mansion on Labor Day 1991, according to Ronald Kessler’s Inside the White House, page 246. “Good morning,” an Arkansas state trooper said to Clinton, according to American Evita, by Christopher Andersen, a former contributing editor with Time magazine.

“F*** off!” Hillary told him and his fellow bodyguards. “It’s enough I have to see you s***-kickers every day! I’m not going to talk to you, too! Just do your goddam job and keep your mouth shut.”

The safe bet for succeeding the Most Equal Comrade as dictator of post-America is a real charmer indeed.

The tax dollars you have busted your tail for are paying for this dog vomit

Six figures for spouting identity politics jackbootery. Not a bad haul.

The Environmental Protection Agency is looking to hire 15 “Diversity and Inclusion Specialists,” each of whom will make $100,000 or more per year.

The agency will hire employees to set up diversity and inclusion “advisory bodies” across the country, according to a government job posting.

“Earth Day is every day at EPA!” the agency said. “At EPA, you can protect human health and the environment of all Americans, and you’ll discover that EPA is one great place to work!”

Here's the nature of the "work" they'll be doing:

The employees will be in charge of implementing a “diversity strategy” within the EPA’s Office of Research and Development. Other duties include analyzing recruitment and retention, as well as setting up diversity and inclusion advisory boards.
The hires will “initiate collaborative efforts between Minority Academic Institutions and EPA Special Emphasis Program Managers to establish an ORD diversity and inclusion advisory body,” the agency said.

So the thugs of arguably the most tyrannical agency of the post-American government will now come in all colors and a variety of imaginary genders.

 

And what of Madame BleachBit's foreign-policy chops, such as they are?

A comprehensive - and grim - look at the trail of disaster BB has wrought across the globe:

Many conservatives hold out hope that, as president, Hillary Clinton will be okay on foreign policy and national security issues. A few even plan to vote for her for this reason, seeing Donald Trump as worse than Clinton on these matters.

Keith Kellogg, a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General and adviser to the Trump campaign, demonstrates that hopes for a sound foreign national security policy can only be founded on wishful thinking and dislike of Trump. They find no support in her record. 

Kellogg begins with Iraq. Clinton voted for that war. Was this a mistake? Clinton says it was.

It certainly was a major mistake to vote (as Clinton did) against the surge that turned the tide in Iraq, and to ridicule Gen. Petraeus, the surge’s architect. And it was a major mistake to pull out of Iraq when President Obama came to office. (The excuses for the pullout have been debunked by Dexter Filkins of the New York Times).

Kellogg blames Clinton for not being able to negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Iraqi government. The evidence suggests that Obama didn’t want to reach an agreement and I believe that this, not poor negotiating by Clinton, is why we didn’t get one. But Clinton was part of the team that gave away our hard-won gains (gains she tried to prevent by opposing the surge) in Iraq.

Kellogg next considers Libya. There can be no Clinton finger pointing when it comes to the disasters that have occurred there. She was the architect of our Libya policy, which, email traffic shows, her team considered her greatest achievement as Secretary of State.

Some achievement. As Kellogg points out:

When [Qaddifi] was overthrown, there was no plan for follow-up governance. The result was instability, a huge refugee flow into southern Europe and the Islamic State gaining a foothold in Libya.

Worse was the eventual loss of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens in the Benghazi terrorist attack. It was the first killing of a U.S. ambassador in the line of duty since 1979. The response from our secretary of state? She claimed his killing was the result of an anti-Islamic video.

Clinton’s Russian reset began badly. As Kellogg reminds us, Clinton couldn’t even get the translation on the idiotic reset button correct: The Russian word emblazoned on the button actually meant “overload.” 

Since the reset, Russia has taken Crimea, invaded main portions of Ukraine, strongly supported Syrian President Bashar Assad, conducted airstrikes against civilians in Aleppo, Syria and significantly increased its military and political presence in the Middle East.

It’s ironic that Clinton is winning the debate over Russia. Yes, Clinton talks tougher than Trump about Russia. But, as Trump likes to say, it’s all talk. 

Egypt is a case in point. In 2009, she called Mubarak a family friend. But when he came under attack, she supported his overthrow and then backed the Muslim Brotherhood government. Now, she denounces the U.S. friendly government as “basically a military dictatorship.”

As for Iran, Clinton backs the great giveaway known as the nuclear deal. We can be confident that in a Clinton administration, Iran will get away with violation after violation. 

What further debacles can we look forward to when she succeeds the Most Equal Comrade as the architect of post-America's doom?

It's not just Morocco by a long shot

The previous post looked into a pay-for-play arrangement involving the king of Morocco and the Clinton Foundation.

It was typical in its stickiness:

Saudi Arabian Influence: 

When Clinton first took office in 2008, the foundation disclosed that Saudi Arabia donated between $10 to $25 million, with some donations coming as recently as 2014 when Clinton prepared her run for the presidency. The foundation received an additional $1 to $5 million donation from the “Friends of Saudi Arabia,” which was cofounded by a Saudi prince. Critics question the ethics of taking such vast sums of money from individuals and a government with one of the worst human rights records in the world.

King Of Moroccan Meeting : 

Emails released by WikiLeaks, in a likely attempt to influence the U.S. election, also reveal Clinton arranged for her foundation to host a meeting in Morocco in return for a $12 million donation from the country’s king. The donation came from a Moroccan state-owned mining company, which later received a $92 million loan guarantee while Clinton served as secretary of state.

“This was HRC’s idea, our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx. $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting,” Clintons aide Huma Abedin wrote in a leaked email to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.

Russian Uranium Ties: 

In another troubling instance, foundation donations were closely linked to a uranium mining company tied to the Kremlin. Canadian leaders of a mining company funneled millions of dollars to the foundation while Clinton was secretary of state, at the same time they needed Department of State approval for the sale of their company to Russia. The Clinton State Department-approved deal gave Russia control of one-fifth of the entire uranium supply in the U.S.

The chairman of the uranium mining company donated $2.35 million to the foundation, without any disclosure from the Clintons. After Russia announced its intention to make a bid for the uranium mining company, former President Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 to deliver a speech in Moscow.

Indonesian Tobacco Magnate:

The Clinton Foundation’s ties also extend to powerful individuals seeking assistance from the U.S. government, with the help of the Clinton network. Indonesian tobacco magnate Putera Sampoerna donated and worked with the foundation before he “got the U.S. government to underwrite millions in loans offered by the foundation and secured high-profile support for its activities from Sec. Clinton and other senior federal officials,” according to a report by The Washington Free Beacon.

Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman: 

The Clinton Foundation further accepted donations from several foreign governments while Clinton served as secretary of state, including Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman.

In the instance of Algeria, the Clinton Foundation acknowledged to The Washington Post in 2015 it should have sought clearance from the Department of State’s ethics office before taking $500,000. After Clinton left office, the foundation received a large donation from the United Arab Emirates.

Clinton Foundation officials ignored nearly all “best practices” urged by good governance organizations, a July Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found. When Trump challenged Clinton to return donations from countries that abuse women and homosexuals, a DCNF investigation found it would amount to between $19.3 million and $55.7 million.

This one's especially grisly:

The Clinton Foundation invited the prime minister of Kosovo to the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting knowing full well that he had been implicated in a human organ trafficking scheme as leader of the Kosovo Liberation Army in the late 1990s.

“What are USG views on WJC inviting former Kosovo PM [Hashim] Thaci and the current PM to CGI?” Clinton Foundation foreign policy adviser Amitabh Desai wrote in an Aug. 17, 2011 email to several top Hillary Clinton State Department officials.

“Is Thaci still embroiled in organ harvesting issues and is that of consequence?” Desai asked in the email, which the State Department recently released to Citizens United.

Desai clarified in a follow-up email that Thaci was actually prime minister at the time. He now serves as president of Kosovo.

Who within the Clinton machine knew this and when?

Thaci’s alleged atrocities, which have not led to prosecution for him or anyone in the KLA, have been laid out in detail in other news reports.

Vice News reported in 2014 that an American diplomat who was appointed in 2011 by the European Union to investigate the claims, found that the KLA murdered 10 Serbian and Albanian prisoners and sold their kidneys and livers on the black market.

Vice also reported that Thaci was known in his KLA days as “The Snake.”

But at this point, what difference does it make?

HuffPo: This Clinton campaign move is so stinky, we'd be remiss not to report it

Unseemly in the extreme:

In the beforetime, in the long, long ago of 2015, a woman named Hillary Clintonwas about to launch her campaign for president. She was also trying really hard to secure $12 million for her family’s charitable foundation from King Mohammed VI of Morocco. And her campaign was freaking out about it.

Campaign manager Robby Mook and longtime Clinton confidant John Podesta thought the deal ― in which Clinton had committed to speak at an event for the king on the condition of his $12 million donation ― would look bad. Clinton aide Huma Abedin tried to explain that it was simply too late to back out.

“This was HRC’s idea,” Abedin wrote in an email to Podesta. “Our office approached the Moroccans and they 100 percent believe they are doing this at her request. The King has personally committed approx $12 million both for the endowment and to support the meeting. It will break a lot of china to back out now when we had so many opportunities to do it in the past few months.” 

The team eventually reached a compromise. Hillary Clinton didn’t show up, but Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton did, and the money came through. 

It is generally frowned upon for presidential candidates to be pumping foreign leaders for money, and her staff recognized it. And so they exchanged a series of contentious emails. On “Fox News Sunday,” host Chris Wallace pressed Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook on the controversy.

“Why wasn’t that classic pay-to-play?” Wallace asked.

“There’s nothing new here,” Mook replied, deflecting to Donald Trump’s sagging poll numbers.

“But, Robby, there is some new stuff,” Wallace responded. “Emails show ― and I’m going to go through some of them ― you were not happy at all the idea of this meeting and her going there.”

Mook maintained that it was all just a scheduling issue that had nothing to do with corruption or public perceptions of corruption.

“We didn’t want her going overseas,” Mook said. “I didn’t want her going overseas before the campaign was kicking off. Again, these are stolen documents.”

Well, yes, Robby, but the truth they reveal is a genie that's not going to go back into the bottle.