Posted on 02/03/2016 8:45:35 AM PST by rktman
Sen Grassley probes Clinton aide Cheryl Mill/s refusal to cooperate with investigators
By Sarah Westwood / Wash/Examiner / feb 2, 2016
A top aide to Hillary Clinton "refused" to cooperate with investigators looking into whether the Clinton team suppressed a 2012 records request that could have exposed their private email use years before a separate congressional inquiry did so, Sen. Chuck Grassley said Monday.
The Senate Judiciary Committee chairman raised concerns about the role Cheryl Mills, then-chief of staff to Clinton, played in blocking a Freedom of Information Act request for Clinton's email use in a pair of letters to the State Department and the agency's inspector general Monday.
Grassley cited an inspector general report made public in January that detailed, among other things, the extent of officials' knowledge of Clinton's private email use throughout the State Department. Dozens of agency staff were aware Clinton used private addresses to shield her communications.
But Mills intervened when a watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, submitted a FOIA request for records "sufficient to show the number of email accounts of, or associated with, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton."
"Ms. Mills and senior department officials knew about Secretary Clinton's use of private email for official correspondence since they were sending emails to her non- government email address," Grassley wrote in his letters Monday. "They would have known instantly of records responsive to that request."
"Yet, it was approximately five months later before the department officially responded to CREW's request for email accounts associated with Secretary Clinton," the Iowa Republican continued. "And its response was misleading, at best: 'no records responsive to your request were located.' "
However, more recent FOIA requests over Clinton's emails have forced the release of thousands of responsive records, including the 55,000 pages of her emails presently published or under review by the State Department.
Grassley said Mills "refused to speak with" officials in the State Department's inspector general office when they approached her about her involvement in smothering CREW's records request in 2012.
According to the inspector general, a State Department spokesman had flagged the potentially damaging FOIA request for Mills, who passed it on to a trusted staffer and White House liaison and instructed her to find out how the agency planned to handle the request. Months later, the watchdog group received a notice that the records they sought did not exist.
Grassley demanded to know why the State Department waited so long to respond to such a simple request, and why the eventual response failed to turn up documents that clearly existed.
The State Department has come under fire over the past year for its handling of FOIA requests, which more than doubled after the discovery of Clinton's private email use in March of last year.
Agency officials have battled dozens of FOIA lawsuits in court, only to have judges shoot down State's arguments against releasing Clinton's records. A handful of such federal cases has forced the agency to hand over documents related to her diplomatic tenure.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/grassley-probes-clinton-aides-refusal-to-cooperate/article/2582202
Hillary Clinton Adviser Sidney Blumenthal Had Financial Stake In US Libya Policy
IBT Media ^ | October 08 2015 | Jackie Salo / FR Posted by george76
Sidney Blumenthal was a principal character in Hillary Clinton's Libyan policy discussions, even though he was neither an official adviser nor an impartial party, according to the Republican chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attack.
In a letter, Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina claims there was a financial stake for Blumenthal in Libya as he pressed for Clinton to intervene. "Blumenthal was not merely acting as a steward of information to Secretary Clinton but was acting as her de facto political adviser," Gowdy said in a blistering letter to Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the Benghazi panel's top Democrat. "While Blumenthal, an old friend of Clinton's, admittedly knew little about Libya and had not ever been to Libya, Clinton seemingly read every one of his emails on the topic that began appearing out of nowhere in February 2011."
At the same time Blumenthal was pushing Secretary Clinton to war in Libya, he was privately pushing a business interest of his own in Libya that stood to profit from contracts with the new Libyan government — a government that would exist only after a successful U.S. intervention in Libya that deposed Qaddafi,†Gowdy wrote, referring to former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.
Blumenthal maintained a frequent dialogue with Clinton about U.S. policy in the country -- nearly half of the emails Clinton received regarding Benghazi and Libya prior to the attacks involved him. Blumenthal, who served as a former White House aide to her husband, was not employed in any official capacity at the time of their correspondence. (Excerpt) Read more at ibtimes.com ...
“that nothing is marked with the word “classifiedâ€,”
The dirty little secret is the marking does not make it classified, it is simply a warning. If the information relates to a certain topic it is “classified” regardless of markings or lack there of. Any one with lowest level clearance knows this as every clearance holder is briefed regularly so there is no misunderstanding......
Being First Lady did not, per se, give Hillary a security clearance. But what nobody has bothered to investigate is whether she in fact had been given a security clearance of her own much earlier.
Note that when she was at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, long before Bill was elected president, she was attorney of record (along with Web Hubble and William Kennedy) for a private company called Systematics. Systematics was at the time a major contractor for the NSA, tasked with implanting bugged transaction-tracking software in just about all the world’s key money-center banks as part of the Reagan-era “follow the money” effort to cripple the Soviets.
She represented Systematics in a curious case in which the SEC sued to block an investor group led by BCCI characters, including the former head of Saudi intelligence, from acquiring DC-based Financial General Bankshares. The would-be buyers wanted to bring in Systematics to run the entire bank’s back-office function. in other words, the NSA was positioning itself to spy on just about every bank account in the nation’s capital. It is highly unlikely that Hillary could have worked for Systematics as its lead lawyer without having a security clearance. (See pp 77-78, “The Oil Card: Global Economic Warfare in the 21st Century.”)
And that raises a darker prospect: Is Hillary the anointed candidate of the national security establishment and its permanent government? They appear to be running interference for her in the email scandal. Why? Because being so utterly compromised, she is assured to do and say whatever she is told.
Is this a ‘everybody does it’ leak put out by the Clintons?
Hillary is a reptile .... so is Cheryl who truly knows where ‘the bodies are buried’ when it comes to the Clintons.
Right before she began work, Huma Abedin formed a private corporation named after her new baby.
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Alana Goodman of the Washington Free Beacon details how Cheryl Mills apparently collected a paycheck from New York University at the same time she was serving as Chief of Staff of the State Department.
According to the article: After joining the State Department in the beginning of 2009, Mills continued to serve as general counsel for NYU for several months. She also sat on the board of the NYU in Abu Dhabi Corporation, the fundraising arm for the university’s UAE satellite campus. The school is bankrolled by the Abu Dhabi government and has been criticized by NYU professors and human rights activists for alleged labor abuses.
The UAE is a major funder of the Clinton Foundation, on whose board Mills sat. The article quotes NLPC Chairman Ken Boehm: Federal of conflict interest statutes are very strict, and they want to ensure that federal employees, especially very senior special employees like Cheryl Mills, do not have any conflicts of interest in any matter that they have a hand in, said Boehm. Given her position, the dual position of counselor and chief of staff, presumably she would have access to almost any decision of importance that came out of the State Department.
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<><> Mills rejoined the board of the Clinton Foundation in 2013, after Hillary exited State.
<><> Mills currently runs the BlackIvy Group, a consulting firm that focuses on dirt-poor Sub-Saharan Africa.
SUB SAHARAN AFRICA / State Dept list
African Union Benin Botswana Burkina Faso Cameroon Congo (Brazzaville) Congo (DRC-Kinshasa) Ethiopia Ghana Guinea Ivory Coast Kenya Lesotho Madagascar Malawi Mauritius Mozambique Namibia Niger Nigeria Rwanda Senegal Sierra Leone South Africa Swaziland Tanzania Togo Uganda Zambia.
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NOTE: Sub Sahara Muslim African immigrants are streaming in to the US at an unprecedented rate, all subsidized by struggling taxpayers. What do Obama and Hillary know about this?
DEMAND CONGRESS SEND YOU THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION AT ONCE:
Demand that you be advised WRT all vouchers submitted by Cheryl Mills for govt reimbursement including:
<><> Mills' expense accounts,
<><> credit cards,
<><> office supplies,
<><> travel, food, clothing, housing allowances,
<><> electronic devices, cell phone charges, wire-transfer charges, etc etc etc.
IS CHERYL MILLS STILL ON THE PAYROLL COLLECTING US GOVT PAYCHECKS (an old bureaucratic trick)?
<><> Did Hillary/s State Dept grant Cheryl Mill/s BlackIvy Group tax monies?
<><> did any of the Sub-Sahara groups receive foreign aid grants from Hillary/s State dept?
<><>Did any of the Sub-Sahara countries listed donate to the Clinton Foundation (in a money-laundering gambit)
<><> Did Mill/s BlackIvy Group donate to The Clinton Foundation?
<><> Did the Clinton Foundation partner w/ BlackIvy Group in sub-Sahara projects?
Probably a red herring. It is at the discretion of POTUS to alter or amend security restrictions as he sees fit. I have first-hand knowledge of Bush 43 ordering IT staff in Iraq to provide foreign allies (primarily UK. Cannuks and Aussies) access to SIPRNet (classified Secret/NoForn) for the sole purpose of receiving (and receiving only) Secret-level emails they otherwise would hot have had access to. The IT staff “stood up” an email server (built from a Dell laptop!) which was hosted on a subnet created exclusively to transmit these emails to those foreign allies, which they received on laptops that only could be used for that one function. SIPRNet access to those certain allies now has been formally amended but at the time they weren’t willing to wait for the change to go “through channels.” All it took was a directive signed by Dubya, and it was “Yessir, yessir, three bags full.”
So if Der Schlickmeister was in on it (and what shady thing was ne not “in on”?), it was kosher.
I was involved in the middle of this issue at the level of the Ministries of Defence if the UK, Australia, and Canada with the U.S. Department of Defense. While what you describe may have been true from your foxhole, the issue was much larger.
All of those particular countries were cleared for SECRET level access for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in fact for worldwide access until specifically excluded. The NoForn restrictions were specifically lifted for combat operations as has always been done since the WWII. The issue was technical. SIPR could not be integrated into the Command and Control Networks in theater because of the protections that had been built into the software. That's why the swivel chair solution was put in place. Everything that they saw, they were cleared to see. We have been doing this with these countries since WWII, but we weren't capable of integrate our digital command and control systems.
Whatever vetting the allied beneficiaries might have passed is immaterial. SIPRNet at the time still was classified NoForn, and giving ANY foreign national access to it, IRRESPECTIVE of any and all clearances, was a strict violation. But all it took was a directive from the CINC to make it happen.
Bottom line, the president has the authority. Who the recipient is is completely immaterial.
Yes, the President had the authority, and he exercised it. Which meant that it was no longer NoForn, it became NoForn except for ABCA nations, Get over it.
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