A bad penny turns up again

Sid Blumenthal, widely known as Sid Vicious, is the bad penny of American political life. He keeps turning up in major scandals — e.g., the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair and the Libya fiasco. In addition, as Eli Lake has pointed out, we learned of Hillary Clinton’s private email server because Blumenthal’s own e-mail was breached by Marcel Lehel Lazar, a Romanian hacker who goes by the moniker Guccifer.

Therefore, we should not be surprised that Trey Gowdy has pretty much said Blumenthal fed information to Christopher Steele in an effort to aid Steele in his quest to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Rebecca Morin of Politico reports:

Steele was working for the Clinton campaign. Thus, when he used Russian sources, many of whom undoubtedly had Kremlin connections, the Clinton campaign was “colluding” with the Russians. In addition, when the Justice Department submitted Steele’s dossier to a court, it was using Team Clinton’s research as a basis for obtaining a warrant to spy Carter Page and anyone in the Trump campaign he might talk to.

Blumenthal’s involvement adds another layer. Team Clinton wasn’t just paying Steele to dig up dirt, it was providing dirt to Steele, via Hillary’s friend Blumenthal and, if I read the Grassley-Graham referral correctly, an unnamed official in the Obama State Department.

I’m interested in knowing who Blumenthal’s “foreign source” was. A Russian, perhaps?

Regardless, it now appears that Team Clinton didn’t just pay for the dossier, it helped manufacture it. And though its efforts weren’t sufficient to secure the big prize for Hillary, they provided the solace of making life difficult for the man who, as the Clintonistas want us to see things, stole the big prize from her.

Here's how Sid, Valerie Plame, and her husband tapped into a bundle of State Dept tax dollars w/ help from their pal, Secy Hillary.

BACKSTORY Sid Blumenthal was (is) the conniving Clintons' bagman---a $325,000 employee of the Clinton Foundation, hired to (gag) promote Clinton's presidential legacy. On the side, Sid promoted dubious foreign deals and schemes in which he had a financial interest many of them predicated on the fall of Libya.

Blumenthal was ambidextrous---emailing Libya foreign policy messages w/ one hand....his other hand firmly in the State Dept cookie jar.

In one (leaked) confidential e-mail to Clinton, Blumenthal was clearly colluding w/ onetime Amb Joe Wilson (Valerie's husband) to score a bundle of tax dollars.

GAME ON Amb Wilson pumped himself as a 'director' of Symbion Power---an outfit seeking millions of dollars in contracts from an obscure government agency chaired by Hillary....the Millennium Challenge Corp (MCC)....a notorious slush fund.

In September 2010, Hillary ordered MCC to award Symbion $47 million tax dollars for (cough) 'power projects in Tanzania.'

......how much of the $47 million tax dollars got to Tanzania after the players divvied it up among Blumenthal, Wilson, the Clintons, Obama?.........

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FREEPER ACTION PROJECT--DO THIS NOW: demand the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) books be opened. We demand to know the financial details and the scope and dimension of individuals connected to these outrageous State Dept giveaways.........govt parasites like Blumenthal, Plame and her husband pocketing zillions at taxayers' expense.

CONTACT CONGRESS HERE------http://www.contactingthecongress.org/

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Milliam Challenege is also the govt agency Obama took 100 million tax dollars to give to Michelle to give to Morocco "to teach Muslim girls." The 100 million is to be held by the Obama Foundation and doled out "when needed."

(waiting for hysterical laughter to die down)

Just how “bad” is Sid Blumenthal??? THIS bad:

From link: http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-has-an-nsa-problem/

As I explained in this column in January, one of the most controversial of Ms. Clinton’s emails released by the State Department under judicial order was one sent on June 8, 2011, to the Secretary of State by Sidney Blumenthal, Ms. Clinton’s unsavory friend and confidant who was running a private intelligence service for Ms. Clinton. This email contains an amazingly detailed assessment of events in Sudan, specifically a coup being plotted by top generals in that war-torn country. Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from a top-ranking source with direct access to Sudan’s top military and intelligence officials, and recounted a high-level meeting that had taken place only 24 hours before.

To anybody familiar with intelligence reporting, this unmistakably signals intelligence, termed SIGINT in the trade. In other words, Mr. Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.

NSA officials were appalled by the State Department’s release of this email, since it bore all the hallmarks of Agency reporting. Back in early January when I reported this, I was confident that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from highly classified NSA sources, based on my years of reading and writing such reports myself, and one veteran agency official told me it was NSA information with “at least 90 percent confidence.”

Now, over two months later, I can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.

Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.

Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.

How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.

Suspicion naturally falls on Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA senior official who was Mr. Blumenthal’s intelligence fixer, his supplier of juicy spy gossip, who conveniently died last August before email-gate became front-page news. However, he, too, had left federal service years before and should not have had any access to current NSA reports.

There are many questions here about what Hillary Clinton and her staff at Foggy Bottom were up to, including Sidney Blumenthal, an integral member of the Clinton organization, despite his lack of any government position. How Mr. Blumenthal got hold of this Top Secret-plus reporting is only the first question. Why he chose to email it to Ms. Clinton in open channels is another question. So is: How did nobody on Secretary Clinton’s staff notice that this highly detailed reporting looked exactly like SIGINT from the NSA? Last, why did the State Department see fit to release this email, unredacted, to the public?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I want to know WHERE Sid got this info & why he’s not in jail.

BTW, Tyler Drumheller was in Anthony Wiener’s address book (that was recently leaked).

>>>>>>Blumenthal, a private citizen who had enjoyed no access to U.S. intelligence for over a decade when he sent that email, somehow got hold of SIGINT about the Sudanese leadership and managed to send it, via open, unclassified email, to his friend Ms. Clinton only one day later.>>>>>>

EXCLUSIVE: Clinton Foundation Got $100M From ‘Blood Minerals’ Firm / dailycaller.com report

A little known Swedish-Canadian oil and mining conglomerate human rights groups have repeatedly charged produces “blood minerals” is among the Clinton Foundation’s biggest donors, thanks to a $100 million pledge in 2007, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found.

“Blood minerals” are related to “blood diamonds,” which are allegedly mined in war zones or sold as commodities to help finance political insurgencies or despotic warlords.

When the Vancouver, Canada-based Lundin Group gave its $100 million commitment to the “Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative,” the company had long been cutting deals with warlords, Marxist rebels, military strongmen and dictatorships in the war-torn African countries of Congo, Sudan and Ethiopia.

Lundin promoted its reputation as a fierce, hard-driving company. Adolf Lundin, who founded the company, audaciously traveled to the French home of Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in 1996 to secure mining rights for his company. A few years later, Lundin admitted he had offered a “donation” to Mobutu’s “elections campaign,” but later said he never gave the funds.

His son, Lukas Lundin, also likes to promote the company’s reputation. He told an interviewer in 2005 his personal philosophy was “to chase elephants. Go big or go home.”

The Lundin Group reportedly cut a deal in 1997 with Congolese Marxist warlord Laurent Kabila, with a $50 million down payment toward $250 million they would give to the rebels in exchange for mining rights, according to according to U.N. Inspector Jason K. Stearns. Lundin eventually won majority rights to one of the country’s richest mineral veins.

A Swedish prosecutor, mirroring the views of human rights groups, once characterized the company as filled with “opportunistic, dictator-hugging businessmen,” a description the company has vigorously denied.

In accepting the $100 million, President Bill Clinton hailed Lundin’s contribution, saying “today’s generous support by the Lundin Group is to be applauded because it demonstrates the potential of this global initiative to capture the imagination and support of the mining sector.”

It wasn’t the first time Clinton consorted with mining moguls. In the waning hours of his presidency in 2001, Clinton pardoned Glencore International mining and oil magnate Marc Rich after his wife, Denise, made generous donations to the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign and his Clinton Library.

Clinton’s pardon erased a 65-count indictment against Rich for trading with Iran against the oil embargo. Rich did the Iranian oil sales while Americans were held captive in the country by the Mullahs.

In the same year the Clinton Foundation accepted Lundin’s money, Swedwatch, a Swedish non-governmental organization that tracks Swedish business dealings in the developing world, released a condemnatory report about the company’s operations in Congo, titled “Risky Business.”

The report detailed widespread suffering in the Congo as whole villages were removed to make way for Lundin’s mining operations.

Six years earlier, the relief organization Christian Aid released a report denouncing the scorched-earth tactics of the Sudanese military to clear villages for Lundin’s petroleum exploration. Its report was titled, “Lundin Oil in Sudan: Scorched Earth.”

Thanks to those reporters and others, Lundin is known in Congress as well. Rep. Joe Pitts, a Pennsylvania Republican who co-chairs the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, told TheDCNF that “areas with high conflict over minerals are breeding grounds for human rights abuses on a massive scale, and when entities like the Clintons’ Foundation accept donations from these corrupt actors, they are sanctioning the exploitation.”

Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh reflected her government’s regret over the Swedish company in April, 2001, saying, “Lundin Oil activities are negative for Sweden.” She added, “we expect Swedish companies to respect an ethical code in line with human rights and the environment in which they operate abroad.”

Although then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited the Congo in 2009, she unexpectedly delayed implementation of a landmark “certification” program designed to assure human rights were respected by mining companies like Lundin in Africa.

The certification process was passed under the Dodd-Frank Act. Her failure to act was criticized at the time by John Prendergast, president of “Enough.org,” a nongovernmental organization which championed the “blood minerals” legislation.

“At rare moments during the course of a war, a confluence of factors come together to provide a window of opportunity for real conflict transformation,” he wrote in 2010, a year after Clinton assumed office. “That missing conductor is the United States, and more specifically, its highest ranking official to travel to Congo and make it a priority: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“At this pivotal moment, it is imperative that Secretary Clinton’s 14 month-old commitments to Congo are translated into concrete actions from the U.S. government.”

Robin Wright, another Enough.org advocate, wrote in Time Magazine that two years after Clinton traveled to the Congo, local villagers told her, “nearly everyone I met asked me to take a message back to ‘Mama Clinton’ to urge her to make good on her promise to implement the certification process.”

Such apparent quid pro quos were common at the Clinton Foundation, charges Charles Ortel, who has extensively studied the foundation.

“Since January 2001, the Clinton family has used their public charity as a vehicle to create enormously valuable concessions in numerous desperately poor and corrupt countries, for individuals who claim that they have made extravagantly large ‘pledges.’”

The final execution of the certification process was announced by the Department of State the same month Clinton left office in February, 2013.

Human rights groups have released numerous reports of the devastation wrought by oil and mining companies in Africa, with many focusing specifically on Lundin.

Swedwatch wrote extensively of the horrors caused by Lundin mining in Congo. “Three villages were relocated to make room for the new mining activities. In October 2007, many resettled families that had been promised new houses were still sheltering under plastic sheeting, waiting for their new houses to be built,” the report stated.

In the Sudan, Christian Aid said field workers in the Sudan “found thousands of Nuer civilians displaced from villages along this road, hundreds of miles away” due to Lundin oil operations, adding, “Then government troops arrived by truck and helicopter, burning the villages and killing anyone who was unable to flee – in most cases, the old and the very young.”

In April, 2001, Swedish Dagens Nyheter journalist Anna Koblanck toured Lundin’s Block 5A oil parcels in the Sudan with company executives.

Koblanck described seeing death and destruction along the way, writing, “the displaced Bentiu are starving to death.” She reported that “many villages along the road are empty.”

Human Rights Watch in 2003 noted Lundin never mentioned the scorched earth tactics in public statements about its presence in the Sudan: “The oil companies, led by Lundin, made no public statement condemning this destruction and displacement in Block 5A, despite the press attention it garnered and the regular alarms from U.N. agencies about the dire state of the needy in this very area.

“None of this fighting nor mass displacement caused the oil consortium, led by Lundin, to express concern about the well-being of the people living in its concession area,” said Human Rights Watch. “Lundin never mentioned the armed conflict in its public releases.”

Accusations of Lundin human rights violations in Ethiopia were so frequent in 2011 two Swedish journalists went there to investigate charges the company was party to widespread human rights violations. They were arrested by Ethiopian authorities government on “terrorism” charges and in 2012 sentenced to 18 years in prison.

The two “were investigating allegations of human rights violations linked to the activities of the Swedish oil company Lundin Oil,” stated PEN, the international journalist organization. The international outcry finally secured their release after more than a year of imprisonment.

For his part, Lukas Lundin has taken a page from the Clintons. He has established his own family Lundin Foundation that showcases an allegedly softer side of the company.

Lundin states the company is concerned about the welfare of local people, emphasizing “education and skills training to maximize local hire” including “sourcing from local producers” and “targeting wealth and employment creation in sectors independent of extractive activities.”

Neither the Clinton Foundation nor Lundin Group responded to requests for comment by TheDCNF. dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

Among the most ethically challenged emails Hillary was desperate to hide dealt w/ "Selling Access."

HERE'S HOW THE CLINTONS SCREWED AFRICA OUT OF ITS VALUABLE MINING RESOURCES: The head of a Canadian company with an enormous interest in Africa....in the Congo's mining and oil sector.....Lukas Lundin of Lundin Mining.....announced a $100 million donation to the Clinton Foundation on the heels of Hillary/s first presidential campaign....as she became Secy of State.

After the Congolese government attempted to regain control of its own mines, the State Department intervened on behalf of Lundin Mining and another mining company, Freeport Mines, also a Clinton foundation donor.

A round of talks in 2010, thought to be aided by the Clinton State Department, concluded with the pair of well- connected companies (Clinton Foundation donors) retaining their stakes in the mines and with the Congolese government being shut out of its own resources. (hat tip Schweizer book---Clinton Cash)

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THE STATE DEPT PAPER TRAIL---- Hillary/s State Dept Aide Shared Classified state Dept Info With Clinton Foundation
2012 Email Shows Hillary Aide Cheryl Mills sent info marked confidential to Clinton Foundation
Reported By Alana Goodman, Free Beacon September 28, 2015

A key aide of Hillary Clinton emailed classified information about the government in Congo to a staffer at the Clinton Foundation in 2012, according to a copy of the correspondence obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Cheryl Mills, Clinton/s chief of staff at the State Department, sent the email to the Clinton Foundation’s foreign policy director, Amitabh Desai, on July 12, 2012.

The message, which was originally obtained by the group Citizens United through a public records request, is partially redacted because it includes foreign government information that has been classified Confidential by the State Department......but was not marked classified by the State Department until this past summer.

Intelligence sources tell the Free Beacon that it would have been classified at the time Mills sent it because foreign government information is considered classified from inception.

The message could add to concerns from congressional and FBI investigators about whether former Secretary Clinton and her aides mishandled classified information while at the State Department.

About half of the forwarded message was redacted due to its classified nature before the State Department released it to Citizens United last month.

Although it is not clear what the redacted section includes, the State Department said in a court motion filed last week that it concerns both foreign government information and critical aspects of U.S. foreign relations, including U.S. foreign activities carried out by officials of the U.S. Government.

The State Department added that the disclosure of this information has the potential to damage and inject friction into our bilateral relationship with African countries whose cooperation is important to U.S. national security.

The Clinton Foundation and the State Department did not respond to request for comment about the email, or say whether Desai...a non-government employee who has worked at the foundation since 2007....would have been authorized to view Confidential information.

---SNIP---

REST AT

http://freebeacon.com/politics/clinton-aide-shared-classified-information-with-foundation-email-shows/

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