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BERLIN — German weekly Der Spiegel reports that the country's foreign intelligence agency eavesdropped on calls made by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his predecessor Hillary Clinton. Der Spiegel reported Saturday that the agency, known by its acronym BND, tapped a satellite phone conversation Kerry made in 2013. The magazine says the agency also recorded a conversation between Clinton and former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan a year earlier. Without naming its sources, Der Spiegel says the calls were collected accidentally and the three officials weren't directly targeted.

The German secret service listened in on at least one of Hillary Clinton’s telephone calls when she was US secretary of state, German media reported Friday. The Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) daily and regional public broadcasters NDR and WDR said documents passed to the CIA by one of its moles inside German intelligence show it eavesdropped on Clinton while she was on a US government plane. […] According to the reports, the Clinton intercept was “not an isolated case”, with the German government apparently giving permission for “spying on a NATO partner”, although it was unclear which of its allies was...

With more than two years remaining until the 2016 presidential election, likely Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton is faring worse than ever in potential matchups against Republican hopefuls. While the GOP has a number of possible candidates vying for attention, many consider it a foregone conclusion that Clinton will be the frontrunner among Democrats. In previous polls, she has enjoyed a healthy lead over any challenger from the other side of the aisle. According to CBS, however, those leads are quickly evaporating. Since February, for example, Clinton’s lead over New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in a head-to-head matchup has plummeted from...

Whatever the Hillary Clinton team had in mind for this summer, this certainly can’t have been it. Her book Hard Choices got panned as political pablum, and she stumbled throughout her promotional tour on what should have been easy and easily-foreseeable questions about her personal wealth and tenure at State. Over the past week, she picked a fight with the White House by attempting to distance herself from Barack Obama’s lack of “organizing principles” in foreign policy, only to make a quick and embarrassing retreat when rebuked publicly by David Axelrod.At the beginning of the summer, Clinton’s popularity put...

His remarks about Ferguson, Mo., and the Michael Brown incident got most of the attention, but the president’s comments on Iraq may be much more important in the long run — and certainly more depressing. The president has never recognized and still refuses to accept the threat posed by the Islamic State. ~snip~ So the bottom line is, is that the situation on the mountain has greatly improved and Americans should be very proud of our efforts. Because of the skill and professionalism of our military and the generosity of our people, we broke the ISIL siege of Mount Sinjar,...

As she expands her political network in advance of an expected presidential run, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband have been cultivating an important ally who some believe could become her vice presidential running mate. Former president Bill Clinton invited Julian Castro, a former San Antonio mayor and incoming Obama Cabinet secretary, to the Clintons’ home in Washington last week for a private dinner that friends described as a chance for Democratic leaders from different generations to become better acquainted. Castro, 39, who is scheduled to be sworn in Monday as secretary of housing and urban development, traveled to New...

The rank spectacle of ex-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton suddenly turning on her commander in chief and former boss to shiv him in the back over the burning ruins she helped make of the Middle East is staggering to behold. The brassiness, dishonesty and shamelessness as she slides into yet another presidential campaign season is enough to choke that old Arkansas draft mule of a husband she hitched her career to. The scheming calculation of it all would make Lady Macbeth take to the bed for blushing. How on earth did such a crafty street fighter get so completely...

You’re probably wondering how the Great Hug-Out over at Vern’s house went last night. While it started out a bit awkwardly: “I’ll never let you down again.”By all accounts Hillary apologized profusely to Big Guy, “I’m sorry I threatened to eat you, little dog. I completely forgot you were black for a minute there.”And now everything is the way it used to be:“You can stop chewing on my ear now.”And now Hilz and Beary are best friends forever again.And remember kids: Sometimes you get the bear, and sometimes the bear gets you: Obama, we have been told, is frustrated, “restless,”...

HILLARY AT THE BEACH - graphics and limerick

Democrats face potentially catastrophic midterm elections that could leave Republicans and conservatives in control of the House, the Senate and the Supreme Court. Yet while Democrats face a political state of emergency, Hillary Clinton this week launched an aggressive preemptive attack — not against Republicans but against Barack Obama, the Democratic president she served as secretary of State, employing lines of attack eerily reminiscent of attacks against Democrats from former Vice President Dick Cheney. Clinton has been running for president for almost a decade. What is striking today is how little she appears to have thought through WHY she would...

Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday apologized to President Obama for remarks many pundits deemed critical of the administration’s foreign policy. Well, “apologized” might be putting it a bit strongly. What Mrs. Clinton really did was clarify and extend comments she made in an Atlantic interview published last weekend. Among other things, Clinton told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg it was a “failure” to not arm moderate rebels in Syria. She said the administration’s mantra of “don’t do stupid stuff” was not a fit organizing principle for a major power in the modern world. But that was then. This is now: On...

There’s no worse assignment for a Secret Service agent than protecting Hillary Clinton, if claims in a controversial new book are to be believed. Ronald Kessler’s book, “First Family Detail,” is filled with salacious revelations about the secret personal lives of the nation’s most high-profile political leaders. “She is so nasty to agents that being assigned to her detail is considered a form of punishment,” Kessler told “Top Line” of Clinton. “It shines a light on her character,” Kessler said. “She claims to be a champion of the little people, and she's going to help the middle class. And, in...

Editor’s note: I think it was the great Maimonides who taught us, “You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” So THE WEEKLY STANDARD is happy to feature this special guest editorial on President Obama's foreign policy failures (excerpted verbatim from Jeffrey Goldberg’s fine interview). – William Kristol On American Power and American Security: “But we’ve also learned about the importance of our power, our influence, and our values appropriately deployed and explained. ... One of the reasons why I worry about what’s happening in the Middle East right now is because of the breakout capacity of jihadist...

Hillary Clinton called President Barack Obama on Tuesday to “make sure he knows that nothing she said was an attempt to attack him” when she recently discussed her views on foreign policy in an interview with The Atlantic, according to a statement from a Clinton spokesman. The statement comes amid tension between the Clinton and Obama camps in the wake of the interview. It also comes as Obama and Clinton, his former secretary of state, are due to cross paths at a social gathering Wednesday night in Martha’s Vineyard. In the interview, Clinton dismissed the Obama administration’s self-described foreign policy...

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton could have a potentially awkward encounter tomorrow night when they meet at a party just days after she criticized the president’s foreign policy. The White House said the president, along with first lady Michelle Obama, planned to see Clinton on Wednesday at a party on Martha's Vineyard for Ann Jordan, wife of Democratic adviser Vernon Jordan. Clinton is on the Massachusetts island for a memoir-signing session at a bookstore, while the Obamas are in the midst of a two-week vacation. It was unclear whether former President Bill Clinton also planned to attend the party. The...

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. Sir Walter Scott’s warning on the complications of dishonesty seems to apply to the recent travails of Hillary Clinton, who has spent the past week or so attempting to distance herself from the disaster of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. That’s a neat trick for someone who served as Secretary of State for four of the five-plus years of the Obama administration, and the White House and its supporters have already lashed out about it, if indirectly.How is the project working? So far, conservatives aren’t buying the...

It’s one thing for Democrats running in red parts of the country to sound like Republicans on the campaign trail. It’s another when Democrats running in purple or even blue territory try to do so. Yet that’s what’s happening in race after race this season. Faced with a treacherous political environment, many Democrats are trotting out campaign ads that call for balanced budgets, tax cuts and other more traditionally GOP positions. Some of them are running in congressional districts that just two years ago broke sharply for President Barack Obama. The Republican-flavored ads provide an early glimpse of how Democrats...

In a new interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, former secretary of State and probable candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2016, Hillary Clinton went further than she has to date in openly criticizing the foreign policy of the president that she served under from 2009 to 2013. Specifically, Mrs. Clinton draws a direct line from the president’s failure to act in Syria to the rise of the Islamic State and the problems it now poses for Iraq and the rest of the region, and generally criticized the president for a having a foreign policy that had no clear sense...

White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes is now publicly responding to criticism from Hillary Clinton of Barack Obama's foreign policy. "On the broad thrust of our foreign policy, she was fully on board," Rhodes tells Politico. Hillary Clinton did a recent interview where she was seen to have been bashing elements of Obama's foreign policy. President Obama has long ridiculed the idea that the U.S., early in the Syrian civil war, could have shaped the forces fighting the Assad regime, thereby stopping al Qaeda-inspired groups—like the one rampaging across Syria and Iraq today—from seizing control of the rebellion....