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Former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson on Thursday tweeted an article that argued American Jews are pushing for war in the Middle East, specifically with Iran. The article, titled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars,” is featured in The Unz Review, an online magazine that bills itself as an “alternative” to the “mainstream media.” After several minutes of questions from Twitter users who were shocked by her tweet, Wilson doubled down, arguing critics should read the article and “put aside” any biases. “1) First of all, calm down. Re-tweets don't imply endorsement. Yes, very provocative, but thoughtful. Many neocon hawks...

Full title: Judicial Watch: State Department Asked Hillary Clinton Lawyers to Delete Specific Classified Records, Return Paper Copies (Washington, DC) - Judicial Watch today released a letter from the Department of State to Hillary Clinton's lawyers that includes a list of classified records to be either deleted or returned to the State Department. The documents were produced under court order in a FOIA lawsuit for all of Clinton emails and for records about her email practices ( Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)). The June 30, 2015, letter from Secretary of State for Management Patrick F....

Valerie Plame Wilson is fundraising to buy a controlling share of Twitter so that she can ban President Trump from the social media platform. "From emboldening white supremacists to promoting violence against journalists, his tweets damage the country and put people in harm's way," Wilson wrote on her GoFundMe page. "But threatening actual nuclear war with North Korea takes it to a dangerous new level." Wilson, who was revealed to be a covert CIA operations officer in a 2003 leak, slammed Twitter executives for ignoring calls to enforce the company's own community standards and delete Trump's account. But Wilson's...

THINNER GRUEL [Jonah Goldberg] Salon.com has a "defense" of Joe Wilson. For the most part, the piece is a dull, he-said she-said about the controversy so far, generally sympathetic to Wilson, with some sneaky bits hid in the dull prose in order to make them seem more reasonable. For example the author, Mary Jacoby, says "But no sale of uranium ever took place, Wilson reported, and that conclusion is not in dispute." That's true, but Bush never said Iraq purchased the uranium, he merely said Iraq sought it. Wilson said Iraq didn't and that his cryptic sweet-tea swilling conversations proved...

The D.C. Court of Appeals reinstated Former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to the bar. Libby was previously convicted of lying in relation to the Valerie Plame scandal and can now freely practice law again. He was disbarred in the District of Columbia in 2008. According to the National Law Journal, Libby entered the courtroom with 11 letters of support from a federal appeals judge and other legal dignitaries. Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wrote that Libby had a “reputation as a skilled and ethical government...

Then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was "feeble," "barely articulate" and "stressed" moments after a hospital room confrontation in March 2004 with Alberto R. Gonzales, who wanted Ashcroft to approve a warrantless wiretapping program over Justice Department objections, according to notes from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that were released yesterday. One of Mueller's entries in five pages of a daily log pertaining to the dispute also indicated that Ashcroft's deputy was so concerned about undue pressure by Gonzales and other White House aides for the attorney general to back the wiretapping program that the deputy asked Mueller to bar...

FBI Director James Comey is being thrust into the spotlight as the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s personal email server intensifies. The FBI is investigating the security of Clinton’s email setup, including if classified information was mishandled. The probe is putting the nation’s top law enforcement agency at the center of a political battle leading into the 2016 election. Comey has long shown an independent streak that's gained him wide bipartisan praise and helped him sail to a 93-1 confirmation vote in the Senate. That independence will be tested with Republican lawmakers demanding answers and the Clinton team dismissive of a...

"Our U.S. Army contacts in the area have told us...There was no Syrian “chemical weapons attack.” Instead, a Syrian aircraft bombed an al-Qaeda-in-Syria ammunition depot that turned out to be full of noxious chemicals and a strong wind blew the chemical-laden cloud over a nearby village where many consequently died. This is what the Russians and Syrians have been saying and – more important –what they appear to believe happened."

A badly burned body found on the floor of a River North parking garage early Tuesday has been identified as a 60-year-old real estate attorney, officials said. Louis S. Cohen, 60, was of the 200 block of Ivy Lane in Highland Park, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. An autopsy Wednesday was pending and did not determine a cause and manner for Cohen’s death, the office said. Just before 6 a.m. Tuesday, police and fire crews responded to a fire in the 11th floor of a parking garage in the 300 block of North LaSalle Drive and found...

Mike Allen reported over the weekend that "Gregory B. Craig, a well-known Washington lawyer who quarterbacked President Bill Clinton's impeachment defense, has been chosen White House counsel by resident-elect Barack Obama". Believe it or not, the time Craig spent shilling for Clinton may have been his most honorable days of work ... In the early 1980s, [Craig] was an attorney for John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan and three others. Craig helped put together an insanity defense that led to Hinckley's acquittal. Nine years later, he advised Ted Kennedy in the Palm Beach rape case involving the senator...

*From:* Kendall, David *Sent:* ‎Saturday‎, ‎August‎ ‎8‎, ‎2015 ‎10‎:‎24‎ ‎PM *To:* Heather Samuelson , Jennifer Palmieri , Cheryl Mills , Brian Fallon , Huma Abedin , Katherine Turner , John Podesta , Philippe Reines , Christina Reynolds *Cc:* Nick Merrill Two things: 1) As to the server turn over, I think we decided to say something like "the server that was used during her tenure as Secretary of State." 2) I would prefer not to use the "March 18, 2009" date, because we know there were other emails using the her clintonemail.com address prior to that date. Could we make...

FBI Director Comey: No "reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges against Hillary ClintonSays the man who once indicted me over a 23-word email that encouraged my team to save subpoenaed documents

The AP review of Clinton's calendar — her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term — identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show...

**SNIP** Valerie Plame, the ex-CIA operative outed by the W. Bush administration, also chimed in. “Astonishing: White House mistakenly identifies CIA chief in Afghanistan,” she tweeted in a sardonic message on Monday. The name of the CIA’s chief of station in Kabul, the agency’s top spy in Afghanistan, was listed among the 15 officials briefing Obama upon his arrival at Bagram Air Base. The White House only caught the error when Washington Post reporter Scott Wilson alerted the press office, after Obama’s schedule was included in an email that was circulated to as many as 6,000 members of the media.

Richard Armitage, who held top national security positions in the administrations of former Presidents George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, said he would vote for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton over her likely Republican rival, Donald Trump. "If Donald Trump is the nominee, I would vote for Hillary Clinton," Armitage, who served as a deputy secretary of State under Bush and as an assistant secretary of Defense under Reagan, told Politico on Thursday. "He doesn't appear to be a Republican. He doesn't appear to want to learn about the issues. So I'm going to vote for Mrs. Clinton." Clinton...

Retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson is no stranger to controversy, with a legacy of questionable statements on Israel and the US government. In 2013 the former chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell suggested that Israel was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Syria. In 2007 Wilkerson appeared in a Dutch documentary, claiming that American foreign policy was dominated by “the Jewish lobby”. Despite his history of inflammatory rhetoric and frequent conspiracy theories, Wilkerson was tapped to serve as a military and foreign policy adviser for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2015. In the wake...

In a book just released, The Story: A Reporter's Journey, Judith Miller, a key witness in the Libby prosecution, states that Patrick Fitzgerald had offered repeatedly to drop all charges against Lewis Libby if he would "deliver" Vice President Cheney to him. In addition, she charges that Fitzgerald manipulated her into incorrectly testifying about a critical conversation she had with Libby and withheld exculpatory evidence from both her and the defense in order to induce her mistaken testimony – testimony the prosecution knew was made because she was acting under a false belief....[must read snip]....Rizzo, of course, is focused only...

Getting lucrative government contracts is easy – if you know the right people.  And in the case of former ambassador Joe Wilson, husband of former CIA officer Valerie Plame, it was Hillary Clinton who greased the skids so that government contracts could go to business associates and friends. Is this really in the job description of the secretary of state? Daily Caller: Wilson’s requests for help — on behalf of an American engineering contractor he consulted for called Symbion Power — is a recurring theme in each monthly Clinton email dump. The latest two batches of records are no different....

Very interesting stuff going on in the Mary McCarthy files. It appears many of us missed a few important connections: One aspect of her background so far comparatively unexamined is her West African uranium connection. She served in a key government position concerned with West African nations producing yellowcake uranium at the same time that Joseph Wilson was working in the area. The two may be considered members of the “yellowcake community” within the Clinton national security apparatus of the 1990s.There are more questions than answers for the moment, but yellowcake uramium is not only of strategic importance for WMD...

WASHINGTON — Americans following this year's presidential campaign would never know it from mainstream media coverage, but the commander in chief we hired four years ago has set the United States on a course for unilateral disarmament. The following people hope you won't notice until after Nov. 6: Vladimir Putin, Liang Guanglie, Kim Jong-un, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, Sayyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, A.Q. Khan and of course, Barack Obama. The 10 individuals above share a common fascination: nuclear weapons. Vladimir Putin, Russia's modern czar; Liang Guanglie, minister of national defense for...