Tag Archives: E-mails

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The smoking gun: State Department pressured FBI to unclassify Clinton e-mails

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

The far left Washington Post reports:

FBI official Brian McCauley had been trying for weeks to get his contact at the State Department to approve his request to put two bureau employees back in Baghdad.

Around May 2015, Patrick Kennedy finally called back.

“He said: ‘Brian. Pat Kennedy. I need a favor,’ ” McCauley recalled in an interview Tuesday. “I said: ‘Good, I need a favor. I need our people back in Baghdad.’ ”

Then Kennedy, a longtime State Department official, explained what he wanted: “There’s an email. I don’t believe it has to be classified.”

The email was from Hillary Clinton’s private server, and Kennedy wanted the FBI to change its determination that it contained classified information.

[…]The purported “quid pro quo” between McCauley and Kennedy was first reported over the weekend by Fox News and the Weekly Standard and confirmed Monday when the FBI released dozens of interview summaries from its criminal investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of state.

The interview summaries showed that Kennedy lobbied multiple bureau officials to change their minds about ­classifying one email on Clinton’s server. At the time, the State Department was reviewing ­Clinton’s emails for release under the Freedom of Information Act and had sent several to the FBI for review.

Fox News and the Weekly Standard first reported on the story because they are not in the tank for Hillary Clinton.

Fox News notes that the FBI dragged their feet on releasing the e-mails showing the quid pro quo proposal:

“Left to their own devices the FBI would never have provided these [records] to Congress and waited until the last minute. This is the third batch because [the FBI] didn’t think they were relevant,” Chaffetz said.

And the Weekly Standard had all the details:

The FBI official spoke with Kennedy and Kennedy raised the possibility of keeping at least one Clinton email from public disclosure by obtaining a “B9” exemption under the Freedom of Information Act, a rarely used exemption that refers to “geological and geophysical information and data.” One email in particular concerned Kennedy and, according to the FBI summary, providing a B9 exemption “would allow him to archive the document in the basement of the department of state never to be seen again.” The FBI official told Kennedy that he would look into the email if Kennedy would authorize a pending request for additional FBI personnel in Iraq.

A summary of an interview with the section chief of the FBI records management division provides further evidence of Kennedy’s attempts to have the classification of some sensitive emails changed. The FBI records official, whose job includes making determinations on classification, told investigators that he was approached by his colleague in international operations after the initial discussion with Kennedy. The FBI records official says that his colleague “pressured” him to declassify an email “in exchange for a quid pro quo,” according to the interview summary. “In exchange for making the email unclassified State would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more agents in countries where they are presently forbidden.” The request was denied.

The Weekly Standard outlines a few more cases where Kennedy pressured the FBI to mark e-mails as not classified.

More:

Kennedy has been a central figure in the Benghazi and email controversies. He was involved in the controversial decisions not to bolster security at the Benghazi diplomatic outpost despite repeated requests for addition security. And although Kennedy is responsible for ensuring State Department compliance with federal records requirements, he communicated regularly with Clinton using her private email. In a sworn deposition in connection with Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by Judicial Watch, Kennedy testified that he exchanged dozens of emails with Clinton and never thought to ask how the private emails would be archived in a manner consistent with federal law. “It’s not something that I ever focused on,” Kennedy testified.

He never thought to ask. It was not something that he ever focused on.

Of course, this is the same FBI that declined to prosecute Clinton for actions that would have been prosecuted if anyone else had committed them – and others have indeed been prosecuted.

News

FBI found 14,900 more emails that Hillary Clinton didn’t turn over to them

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

This is from the radically leftist Washington Post, of all places:

The FBI’s year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s private email server uncovered 14,900 emails and documents from her time as secretary of state that had not been disclosed by her attorneys, and a federal judge on Monday pressed the State Department to begin releasing emails sooner than mid-October as it planned.

Justice Department lawyers said last week that the State Department would review and turn over Clinton’s work-related emails to a conservative legal group. The records are among “tens of thousands” of documents found by the FBI in its probe and turned over to the State Department, Justice Department attorney Lisa Ann Olson said Monday in court.

[…]Lawyers for the State Department and Judicial Watch, the legal group, are negotiating a plan for the release of the emails in a civil public records lawsuit before U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington.

[…]Judicial Watch filed the lawsuit in May 2015 after disclosures that Clinton had exclusively used a personal email server while secretary of state. Judicial Watch had sought all emails sent or received by Clinton at the State Department in a request made under the federal Freedom of Information Act, which covers the release of public records.

Hillary is the first Secretary of State to have a private e-mail server hidden from her employers, which she kept in her home. Hillary withheld more of her emails from investigators as “personal and private”, and released less than half of them to the State Department. She deleted more e-mails than she turned over to the State Department.

I work for a major company. About 1 out of every 1000 e-mails I send is personal, and it is usually a reminder that I sent to myself (and CC my Dad) to bring coffee creamer to work because I ran out. I assume that my employers have access to my work e-mail, which is why I don’t put anything sensitive and personal in it. In any big company, all your work e-mails are subject to investigation if anything goes wrong… which is why Hillary didn’t want her employer having access to hers.

Hillary has been trying to blame her decision to hide her e-mails from her employer on Colin Powell, of all people.

CNN says Powell denies everything she is saying:

Colin Powell is pushing back on reports suggesting that he might have given Hillary Clinton the idea to use a private email account as Secretary of State, telling media outlets that “her people are trying to pin it on me.”

[…]”The truth is, she was using (the private email server) for a year before I sent her a memo telling her what I did,” Powell said.

CNN has reached out to the Clinton campaign, as well as representatives for Powell, and has not yet received a response.

Powell, who endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 and 2012, has not yet made a formal endorsement in the 2016 presidential election.

Now, I know what Democrat voters will say to this because I’ve talked to some Democrat voters that I know. They’re not going to care. They don’t have any moral sense to see anything wrong with what Clinton did. What is important to them is that their pro-abortion, anti-religious liberty agenda move forward. Little things like transparency and accountability in government don’t matter. Who cares about morality, the Democrat voters say – just give us our fun and give us our stuff.

I was listening to the Ben Shapiro show Monday night, and he gave his best guess about why Hillary had a private e-mail server. His guess, which surprises no one, is that Hillary sold her authority at the State Department for money. She got contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and enormous speaking fees from banks, foreign corporations, etc. She’s raised half a billion dollars for her campaign. I guess that’s what the Presidency costs these days. And why we can’t get any honest candidates.

News

Democrat DOJ declines to prosecute Democrat IRS officials who persecuted conservatives

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Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote testifies about being persecuted by the fascist IRS
Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote testifies about being persecuted by the fascist IRS

The latest news on the IRS scandal; the corrupt Department of Justice is refusing to file charges against the corrupt Internal Revenue Service officials who persecuted conservatives.

Breitbart News reports:

The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Friday that Lois Lerner, and other IRS officials involved in targeting conservative groups’ tax exempt applications, will not have criminal charges filed against them.

[…]In a statement responding to the DOJ, [House Judiciary chairman Rep. Bob ] Goodlatte said, “At every turn President Obama and administration officials have repeatedly and publicly undermined the investigation into the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups yet today’s announcement from the Department of Justice is still very disturbing.”

The chairman continued:

I repeatedly called on then Attorney General Holder to appoint a Special Counsel to conduct the investigation to ensure a fair and thorough process but instead the investigation was led by a loyal Democratic donor. Even as far back as last year unnamed DOJ officials leaked information to the media suggesting that the Department did not plan to file criminal charges over the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups.

[…]When an Inspector General’s audit found that IRS agents had targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups during the 2010 and 2012 elections in their applications for tax-exempt status, a firestorm ensued. Multiple investigations by congressional committees focused primarily on Lerner’s part in the activities, with investigators discovering her emails that denigrated Republicans. Subsequently, the House voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress in 2014 following her refusal to answer the Oversight Committee’s questions.

In response to the DOJ’s announcement, Tea Party Patriots CEO and co-founder Jenny Beth Martin said, “By failing to indict Lois Lerner, the Obama Justice Department – or, should we say, the Obama Injustice Department – is making a mockery of this ‘investigation,’ when countless American citizens, by Ms. Lerner’s own admission, were persecuted by the Internal Revenue Service.”

“This is a woman, after all, who looked into the camera at a national television audience and directly at a congressional committee and refused to answer their questions for fear of incriminating herself,” Martin continued in her statement. “This is just the latest evidence that the Justice Department, whether under Eric Holder or Loretta Lynch, has simply become the political hatchet-men for President Obama and his cronies throughout the administration.”

Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and president of Citizens for Self Governance—a group that continues its class lawsuit against the IRS—said, “Lois Lerner made an entire career out of attacking conservatives and Christians starting with her time at the FEC. There is a reason the majority of Americans fear their government, and Lerner is the poster child for that reason.”

Meckler added that, via the DOJ’s decision not to file charges, Lerner “has been rewarded for abusing her government positions to attack her fellow citizens. And until the Department of Injustice once again becomes the Department of Justice, Americans will live in fear.”

“It’s no wonder why so many Americans have had it with Washington and the elite political class who can get away with something like this,” he said. “We will continue to press our case in the courts to bring justice and to defend or protect our First Amendment rights and to preserve our democratic republic.”

The article does not mention what happened to True the Vote, so I want to remind everyone what the IRS persecution of conservative groups really looks like.

Catherine Engelbrecht

Here is True the Vote’s CEO reacting to the news that the mandatory taxes that she pays was used to pay the salaries of the corrupt IRS leaders who persecuted her:

And here is her testimony during the investigation of IRS corruption:

And of course, the mainstream media covered up for the IRS, because the laws don’t protect everyone equally.

Elijah Cummings

Interesting that the loudest mouth at the Benghazi hearing was actually the driving force behind the use of the IRS as a weapon against Tea Party groups.

Katie Pavlich writes about it at Townhall:

New IRS emails released by the House Oversight Committee show staff working for Democratic Ranking Member Elijah Cummings communicated with the IRS multiple times between 2012 and 2013 about voter fraud prevention group True the Vote. True the Vote was targeted by the IRS after applying for tax exempt status more than two years ago. Further, information shows the IRS and Cummings’ staff asked for nearly identical information from True the Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht about her organization, indicating coordination and improper sharing of confidential taxpayer information.

Chairman of the House Oversight Committee Darrell Issa, along with five Subcommittee Chairmen are demanding Cummings provide an explanation for the staff inquiries to the IRS about True the Vote and for his denial that his staff ever contacted the IRS about the group.

“Although you have previously denied that your staff made inquiries to the IRS about conservative organization True the Vote that may have led to additional agency scrutiny, communication records between your staff and IRS officials – which you did not disclose to Majority Members or staff – indicates otherwise,” the letter to Cummings states. “As the Committee is scheduled to consider a resolution holding Ms. Lerner, a participant in responding to your communications that you failed to disclose, in contempt of Congress, you have an obligation to fully explain your staff’s undisclosed contacts with the IRS.”

The first contact between the IRS and Cummings’ staffers about True the Vote happened in August 2012. In January 2013, staff asked for more information from the IRS about the group. Former head of tax exempt groups at the IRS Lois Lerner went out of her way to try and get information to Cummings’ office.The information Cummings received was not shared with Majority Members on the Committee.

And this is why, when conservatives like me are asked which departments we would abolish at the federal level, so their responsibilities can be pushed down to the state level, we typically answer: The Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Internal Revenue Service. As for the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, we need a housecleaning of all the executives to ensure that they are professional and non-partisan in the execution of their duties.

There is some good news: The House Republicans are impeaching the Commissioner of the IRS John Koskinen.

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