Tag Archives: Corruption

Director of OPM was focused on promoting gay agenda, not national security

Katherine Archuleta, Director of OPM Diversity
Katherine Archuleta, Director of OPM Diversity

Are Democrats capable of taking national security and foreign policy seriously?

Well, consider the recent hack of Office of Personnel Management records by Chinese hackers.

The radically leftist New York Times reports on the extent of the hack:

The Obama administration on Thursday revealed that 21.5 million people were swept up in a colossal breach of government computer systems that was far more damaging than initially thought, resulting in the theft of a vast trove of personal information, including Social Security numbers and some fingerprints.

Every person given a government background check for the last 15 years was probably affected…

The agency said hackers stole “sensitive information,” including addresses, health and financial history, and other private details, from 19.7 million people who had been subjected to a government background check, as well as 1.8 million others, including their spouses and friends.

[…]The breaches constitute what is apparently the largest cyberattack into the systems of the United States government, providing a frightening glimpse of the technological vulnerabilities of federal agencies that handle sensitive information.

Has any Democrat being fired for this catastrophic failure?

No:

In a conference call to detail the grim findings and announce the agency’s response, Katherine Archuleta, the director of the Office of Personnel Management, said that she would not resign despite calls from members of Congress in both parties for her dismissal.

“I am committed to the work that I am doing at O.P.M.,” she said. “We are working very hard, not only at O.P.M. but across government, to ensure the cybersecurity of all our systems, and I will continue to do so.”

Let’s read about Katherine Archuleta to see why Obama chose her to run OPM:

This morning, Katherine Archuleta was sworn-in as the 10th Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and will serve as the Federal government’s personnel chief. She will be the first Latina to hold this position. Katherine shares President Obama’s vision for diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce…

[…]OPM has recognized and acknowledged the underrepresentation of Hispanics in the federal work force, and the potential and talent they have to offer.  OPM has made it a point to expand outreach and recruitment within the Hispanic community…

[…]Katherine also worked as the National Political Director for President Obama’s reelection campaign…

[…]Katherine served as the Executive Director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center Foundation…

So, her main qualification for the job of safeguarding government personnel records from hackers seems to be that she helped Obama get re-elected by reaching out to Hispanic voters.

And in fact this new story in The Weekly Standard shows that diversity was her focus at the OPM.

Excerpt:

The day before the Office of Personnel Management first announced a massive data breach of personal information, now former OPM director Katherine Archuleta’s attention was focused elsewhere. Archuleta published a blog post on June 3 entitled “Celebrating Every Member of Our Federal Family” in recognition of “LGBT Pride Month.” The White House reposted Archuleta’s article the same day.

In her post, Archuleta announced the release of an updated guide called “Addressing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination in Federal Civilian Employment: A Guide to Employment Rights, Protections, and Responsibilities.”

As we celebrate LGBT Pride Month, I want to proudly reinforce my continued commitment to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender members of our federal family, and recognize the incredible contributions this community has made in service to the American people…

That’s why I’m so excited to announce that the Office of Personnel Management is joining our partners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit System Protections Board, and the Office of Special Counsel to release an updated guide titled “Addressing Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination in Federal Civilian Employment: A Guide to Employment Rights, Protections, and Responsibilities.” This informative resource will help LGBT federal employees make more informed choices about how best to pursue their individual claims when they believe they have suffered from discrimination.

On the OPM website, the agency has seven “top priorities” listed. The first two are “Honoring the Workforce” and “Build a More Diverse and Engaged Workforce”.

Obama didn’t hire this woman because she had any qualifications related to the job. He hired her because she was a radical leftist who helped him get re-elected. And when she was appointed, she focused on what she was good at – pushing a leftist ideological agenda instead of doing her job. And we taxpayers had to pay her to do that.

And finally, as if all that were not bad enough, during the 2012 election campaign, she mocked Mitt Romney for his concerns about national security on Twitter.

We have had FOUR catastrophic security breaches under this government: Snowden, Bradley Manning, Hillary’s unsecure e-mail server, and this China hack. Is that by accident? Or is there something about being feelings-obsessed that makes it harder to take threats from our enemies seriously?

New report: IRS used hundreds of lawyers to hide IRS persecution of conservatives

IRS Chief Fascist Lois Lerner
IRS Chief Fascist Lois Lerner

This is from the Washington Times. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

The IRS’s director of privacy, governmental liaison and disclosure division testified Wednesday that the tax agency set up a special team with hundreds of lawyers to handle the probe into whether Tea Party groups were targeted, but repeatedly said she had no idea how it operated.

Mary Howard, who also works as the head Freedom of Information Act officer in the IRS, told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that once the “special project team” was created and operational, she never saw requests for information.

“My understanding was that it started soon after the request came from Congress and other investigators asking for documents around this whole issue,” which she surmised meant around spring of 2013.

Asked who was on the team, she said: “My first hand knowledge of that is none.” But she did say the Chief Council of the IRS — one of only two political appointees in the IRS; the other is the commissioner — was on the “special project team,” as were “hundreds of attorneys.”

She said her office did not interact with the White House, but asked whether the “special project team” did, said: “I have no personal knowledge of how that team acted except that I know they amassed hundreds of attorneys to go through the documents and redact them.” 

[…]Congress held Lerner in contempt after she claimed she did not know about the targeting, but then later took the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions. She was never prosecuted by the Justice Department, but two dozen House members want new Attorney General Loretta Lynch to pursue charges.

Just to be clear – “go through the documents and redact them” means conceal information from Congressional oversight.

This is the very definition of a cover-up. As if we did not have enough scandals in this administration already. We must be up to about a dozen Watergates already.

The ACLJ notes that this is not the first shifty behaviour from the IRS lawyers – delaying the applications of Tea Party groups for years:

According to multiple IRS attorneys in D.C., including tax law specialist Carter Hull, who oversaw the review of the Tea Party cases, Lois Lerner, former Director at the Exempt Organizations Division, and her top advisor directed that certain Tea Party applications as part of a “test” group be sent to her office and IRS Chief Counsel for review in the winter of 2010-2011.

Chief Counsel’s office, after months more of delay, then demanded Mr. Hull make further inquiries of the Tea Party.  According to the testimony, it was Chief Counsel’s office that was demanding to know more information about the conservative groups’ activities “right before the [2010] election period.  In other words, immediately before.”

In addition, the testimony indicates that the Chief Counsel’s office was heavily involved in preparing a template for handling these cases, something Mr. Hull testified was impractical “because these organizations, all of them are different.  A template wouldn’t work.”  Yet, as he testified, a template was prepared by someone in Chief Counsel’s office in conjunction with other tax law specialists.  Even more disturbing he testified that after three years, IRS Chief Counsel’s office had not made a determination about these “test” Tea Party cases, even though in 2011, Mr. Hull had all the information he needed to make a recommendation as to their request for tax-exempt status.

The ACLJ has an ongoing lawsuit on behalf of many of the conservative / pro-life / Christian groups that were targeted by the IRS. It’s times like this where I wonder what my friend the evangelical woman who voted twice for Obama would say. She is the one who is for environmentalism and big government, you remember. Well, there’s your big government right there, Jessica. Surprise! They don’t like Christians or conservatives.

Mitt Romney: Hillary’s Clinton Foundation Uranium One scandal “looks like bribery”

What looks like bribery? Well, read this story from the radically leftist New York Times, of all places. It should be the end of Hillary’s campaign.

Excerpt:

The headline in the website Pravda trumpeted President Vladimir V. Putin’s latest coup, its nationalistic fervor recalling an era when its precursor served as the official mouthpiece of the Kremlin: “Russian Nuclear Energy Conquers the World.”

The article, in January 2013, detailed how the Russian atomic energy agency, Rosatom, had taken over a Canadian company with uranium-mining stakes stretching from Central Asia to the American West. The deal made Rosatom one of the world’s largest uranium producers and brought Mr. Putin closer to his goal of controlling much of the global uranium supply chain.

But the untold story behind that story is one that involves not just the Russian president, but also a former American president and a woman who would like to be the next one.

At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.

[…]The path to a Russian acquisition of American uranium deposits began in 2005 in Kazakhstan, where the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra orchestrated his first big uranium deal, with Mr. Clinton at his side.

The two men had flown aboard Mr. Giustra’s private jet to Almaty, Kazakhstan, where they dined with the authoritarian president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. Mr. Clinton handed the Kazakh president a propaganda coup when he expressed support for Mr. Nazarbayev’s bid to head an international elections monitoring group, undercutting American foreign policy and criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, his wife, then a senator.

Within days of the visit, Mr. Giustra’s fledgling company, UrAsia Energy Ltd., signed a preliminary deal giving it stakes in three uranium mines controlled by the state-run uranium agency Kazatomprom.

[…][T]he company’s story was hardly front-page news in the United States — until early 2008, in the midst of Mrs. Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, when The Times published an article revealing the 2005 trip’s link to Mr. Giustra’s Kazakhstan mining deal. It also reported that several months later, Mr. Giustra had donated $31.3 million to Mr. Clinton’s foundation.

[…][T]he ultimate authority to approve or reject the Russian acquisition rested with the cabinet officials on the foreign investment committee, including Mrs. Clinton — whose husband was collecting millions of dollars in donations from people associated with Uranium One.

Romney, in his interview with Hugh Hewitt, explained that because Bill and Hillary are married, their assets are co-mingled.

So what’s the problem with this deal?

The national security issue at stake in the Uranium One deal was not primarily about nuclear weapons proliferation; the United States and Russia had for years cooperated on that front, with Russia sending enriched fuel from decommissioned warheads to be used in American nuclear power plants in return for raw uranium. Instead, it concerned American dependence on foreign uranium sources. While the United States gets one-fifth of its electrical power from nuclear plants, it produces only around 20 percent of the uranium it needs, and most plants have only 18 to 36 months of reserves, according to Marin Katusa, author of “The Colder War: How the Global Energy Trade Slipped From America’s Grasp.”

“The Russians are easily winning the uranium war, and nobody’s talking about it,” said Mr. Katusa, who explores the implications of the Uranium One deal in his book. “It’s not just a domestic issue but a foreign policy issue, too.”

It’s a national security issue. We shouldn’t be selling uranium companies to countries like Russia who not only invade their neighbors, but also sell long-range missiles to Iran – and a host of other nasty things, too. This country is not friendly to us.

Hillary Clinton: secretive, entitled, hypoctritical
Hillary Clinton: secretive, entitled, hypoctritical

What was Hillary’s response? It’s a distraction invented by the vast right-wing conspiracy:

That’s some vast right-wing conspiracy that makes its way onto the nation’s most respected leftist national newspaper.

So, does this explain why Hillary Clinton deleted tens of thousands of e-mails and then wiped her private e-mail server clean? We’ll never know, because she destroyed all the evidence. But one thing is for sure – there is no reason to vote for this candidate for President, although some people will:

That’s the only “reason” that people will vote for her, because on the merits, she’s a stinker.

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