Archive for the ‘Dirty Tricks and Thuggery’ Category

BY Craig Andressen

Apparently, it’s becoming SO burdensome on the Dictator’s administration, one scandal coming after another, that they have now decided to wrap 3 into one.

The “scandal” of the day involves the State Department of Debauchery under the former future occupier of the oval office.

I can’t even hear myself THINK over the din of blowing whistles.

In this episode, we find a tooter sounding off on alleged abuses of power including frequenting prostitutes, pedophilia and drug rings.

Lovely.

Part 1 – According to the allegations, a U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, had been known to troll the parks for recreation in the form of hookers and under aged girls…A State Department security officer in Beirut allegedly sexually assaulting women who worked in the embassy…The same man allegedly also sexually assaulted women in Baghdad, and possibly Khartoum and Monrovia while assigned to posts there…A member of Hillary’s security detail allegedly engaging prostitutes in several overseas locations…And an underground drug ring being operated by State Department officials in Iraq.

Those are “alleged” criminal activities.

“Allegedly”…Because it has never been proven and, that is part 2 of this 3 part “scandal.”

The reason it has never been proven or, disproven for that matter is because…According to the whistle-blower, undersecretary of state for management Patrick Kennedy ordered the State Department’s Investigator General…”not to open a formal investigation.”

That is an “alleged” cover up of “alleged” criminal activities.

That brings us to part 3…

We now learn that, again, according to whistle-blowers, details and allegations of all this wrongdoing from part 1 of this “scandal” had been ordered SCRUBBED from initial reports.

That would be a cover up of the cover up of the allegations.

So…Who IS this whistle-blower?

It’s former State Department Investigator General Senior Investigator Aurelia Fedenisn.
I KNOW THIS WILL SEEM UNBELIEVABLE AND SHOCKING BUT…

According to Nicholas Merrill, spokesman for Hillary Clinton…”The Secretary was completely unaware of any of the investigations, including the case involving her personal security detail…We learned of it from the media.”

Imagine that.

She didn’t know anything about ANY of it until she heard it on the news.

What we have here are 3 options.

Option 1 – The whistle-blower, former State Department Investigator General Senior Investigator Aurelia Fedenisn…Is making all of this up but, she seems to have the documentation to back her claims AND, were she making this up, she would, as a career State Department Investigator, be finished.

Option 1 doesn’t seem remotely plausible.

Option 2 – Combined with her nonsensical statements regarding Benghazi…The notion that she had no idea of what was happening before, during or after the terrorist attacks, he current claim that for years, she had no idea whatsoever of the allegations surrounding so very many with whom she worked so very closely being involved in drug rings, sexual assaults, prostitutes and pedophilia or the initial investigations into those criminal activities and the cover up of them would make her THE most ignorant and idiotic person to ever hold the office of Secretary of State.

Option 3 – Hillary knew damn well of ALL of it…Benghazi AND these allegations of sexual and drug related criminal activity and either participated in or turned a blind eye to the cover up of it.

Either of the last 2 options would lean anyone with a shred of common sense to realize that she simply is not fit for the oval office in any way, shape or form.

Will liberals and socialists continue to push for her to run and vote for her in 2016?

Of course they will but, I DID state, “anyone with a shred of common sense,” which leaves liberals and socialists out of the equation.

Liberal pundits are already trying their darnedest to downplay any notion that there is anything to this and going so far as to ask…”Well…Where are the prostitutes? Why aren’t THEY coming forward?”

As we know full well that this heinous administration has threatened everybody from Members of the press to whistle-blowers, harassed Conservatives and Conservative groups via the IRS and simply made some 30 or so Benghazi survivors disappear into thin air not to mention the fact that 20 or so Navy SEALS from SEAL team 6 are now dead as a result of some…chopper crash…

It’s not hard to believe that the State Department would be able to threaten hookers and young girls…Is it?

So…In the face of these allegations and the whistle-blowing, what has the Department of Debauchery to say for itself?

Here’s the current spin from State Department blatherer Jen Psaki:

“We hold all employees to the highest standards. We take allegations of misconduct seriously and we investigate thoroughly. All cases mentioned in the CBS report were thoroughly investigated or under investigation, and the — the department continues to take action. Finally, the department has responded to the recommendations in the OIG report regarding the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s of Investigations and counter-intelligence. Diplomatic Security has taken the further step of requesting additional review by outside experience law enforcement officers on top of the OIG inspection so that officers with law enforcement experience can make expert assessments about our current procedures.”

While ALL of these allegations of sexual and drug related criminal behavior are disturbing, to say the least, the MOST disturbing is that which alleges our Ambassador to Belgium was trolling for UNDER AGED prostitutes.

According to Psaki, “I can say broadly that the notion that we would not vigorously pursue criminal misconduct in a case – in any case is preposterous.”

PREPOSTEROUS???

Ambassador Howard Gutman is an Obama supporter but not just ANY Obama supporter.

HE was an OBAMA BUNDLER who put together a half a million dollars for Obama’s campaign.

Investigating someone THAT close to OBAMA leading up to the 2012 election? THAT, in the eyes of THIS corrupt administration…THAT would have been PREPOSTEROUS.

Investigate HILLARY’S personal security detail for engaging hookers IN THE VERY HOTEL WHERE CLINTON WAS STAYING AND PUT A BLEMISH ON her 2016 CHANCES???

THAT would be PREPOSTEROUS!!!

Anything, regarding telling the truth, in any part of this administration is a PREPOSTEROUS notion.

by Katie Pavilch

More State Department Cover-up: Shooting of Two Pregnant Women and Two Men
Katie Pavlich

Things for the State Department just keep getting worse. First we learned from CBS News that Department official covered up and interfered with inspector general investigations of sexual misconduct, including the soliciation of prostitutes by an ambassador. Then we learned those sexual solicitations involved minors. Now, we’re learning State Department officials covered up the shooting of four Hondurans. More from the New York Post:

A top State Department official stymied investigators trying to get to the bottom of four killings in Honduras involving DEA agents and local police — yet another revelation from internal memos leaked by a whistleblower claiming a pattern of coverups.

The incident ended in the deaths of two pregnant women and two men last year, after Honduran national police opened fire from a State Department-owned helicopter on a small boat.

Honduran police said drugs were involved, but locals said the boat was full of fishermen. The killings were referenced in a whistleblower memo obtained by The Post.

Two Drug Enforcement Administration agents were involved, an agency spokeswoman said, and they were accompanied by Honduran national police on two State helicopters with contractors as pilots.

According to an internal 2012 document, the DEA agents were under the authority of the State Department chief of mission in Honduras, funded by a counternarcotics program, and were “subject to investigation” by State investigators.

But when those inquiries began, “despite requests by the US ambassador to Honduras and congressional pressure, DEA reportedly [was] not cooperating.”

With everything happening in Washington right now, it’s easy to let things like this slip through the cracks. It’s more than clear the State Department is operating in a culture without accountability. But, what difference does it make?

By Sandy Fitzgerald
The State Department has been covering up allegations of illegal behavior within its ranks, including drug trafficking by contractors in Iraq and the use of prostitutes by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security personnel, according to a newly uncovered internal Inspector General’s memo.

CBS News reports it has seen a memo citing eight specific examples including claims that a State Department security official in Beirut “engaged in sexual assaults” on foreigners hired as embassy guards.

Another case involved members of the security detail that was supposed to be protecting Clinton on her frequent overseas trips. The report said their use of prostitutes was “endemic.”

In addition, the memo details an underground drug ring in Baghdad that supplied State Department security contractors with drugs, CBS says.

Aurelia Fedenisn, who worked for the Department’s Inspector General, told the network there were also several allegations of criminal wrongdoing that were never prosecuted, with Diplomatic Security Service agents telling the Inspector General’s office that senior State Department officials had told them to back off.

“We were very upset,” Fedenisn told CBS. “We expect to see influence, but the degree to which that influence existed and how high up it went, was very disturbing.”

In one of the alleged cover-ups, State Department agents told the Inspector General to stop investigating a case of an ambassador in a sensitive diplomatic post who “routinely ditched … his protective security detail.” The inspectors believe that was because he was meeting prostitutes.

After the allegations against him surfaced, sources said, the ambassador was called to Washington for a high-level meeting, but was sent back to his post.

Fedenisn told CBS the activities “present a serious risk to the United States government.”

Mike Pohelitz, a retired senior DSS agent involved in one of the cases, told CBS he was ordered to stop investigating. He said he believed the order came from “somebody high in the Diplomatic Security Service.”

The State Department refused comment on “specific allegations of misconduct, internal investigations or personnel matters.”

“Not all allegations are substantiated,” the department said in a statement to CBS. “It goes without saying that the Department does not condone interference with investigations by any of its employees.”

© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/state-department-prostitutes-drug/2013/06/10/id/508999#ixzz2VpzFDjwP
Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

Government lawyers are trying to keep buried a classified court finding that a domestic spying program went too far.

By David Corn

In the midst of revelations that the government has conducted extensive top-secret surveillance operations to collect domestic phone records and internet communications, the Justice Department was due to file a court motion Friday in its effort to keep secret an 86-page court opinion that determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying.

This important case—all the more relevant in the wake of this week’s disclosures—was triggered after Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate intelligence committee, started crying foul in 2011 about US government snooping. As a member of the intelligence committee, he had learned about domestic surveillance activity affecting American citizens that he believed was improper. He and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), another intelligence committee member, raised only vague warnings about this data collection, because they could not reveal the details of the classified program that concerned them. But in July 2012, Wyden was able to get the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to declassify two statements that he wanted to issue publicly. They were:

* On at least one occasion the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court held that some collection carried out pursuant to the Section 702 minimization procedures used by the government was unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

* I believe that the government’s implementation of Section 702 of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] has sometimes circumvented the spirit of the law, and on at least one occasion the FISA Court has reached this same conclusion.

For those who follow the secret and often complex world of high-tech government spying, this was an aha moment. The FISA court Wyden referred to oversees the surveillance programs run by the government, authorizing requests for various surveillance activities related to national security, and it does this behind a thick cloak of secrecy. Wyden’s statements led to an obvious conclusion: He had seen a secret FISA court opinion that ruled that one surveillance program was unconstitutional and violated the spirit of the law. But, yet again, Wyden could not publicly identify this program.

“When the government hides court opinions describing unconstitutional government action, America’s national security is harmed,” argues the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Enter the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public interest group focused on digital rights. It quickly filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Justice Department for any written opinion or order of the FISA court that held government surveillance was improper or unconstitutional. The Justice Department did not respond, and EFF was forced to file a lawsuit a month later.

It took the Justice Department four months to reply. The government’s lawyers noted that they had located records responsive to the request, including a FISA court opinion. But the department was withholding the opinion because it was classified.

EFF pushed ahead with its lawsuit, and in a filing in April, the Justice Department acknowledged that the document in question was an 86-page opinion the FISA court had issued on October 3, 2011. Again, there was no reference to the specific surveillance activity that the court had found improper or unconstitutional. And now the department argued that the opinion was controlled by the FISA court and could only be released by that body, not by the Justice Department or through an order of a federal district court. In other words, leave us alone and take this case to the secret FISA court itself.

This was puzzling to EFF, according to David Sobel, a lawyer for the group. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union had asked the FISA court to release an opinion, and the court had informed the ACLU to take the matter up with the Justice Department and work through a district court, if necessary.

So there was a contradiction within the government. “It’s a bizarre catch-22,” Sobel says. On its website, EFF compared this situation to a Kafka plot: “A public trapped between conflicting rules and a secret judicial body, with little transparency or public oversight, seems like a page ripped from The Trial.”

Before EFF could get a ruling on whether this opinion can be declassified and released, it had to first sort out this Alice in Wonderland situation. Consequently, last month, it filed a motion with the FISA court to resolve this aspect of the case. “We want the FISA court to say that if the district court says the opinion should be released, there is noting in its rules that prevents that,” Sobel says. Then EFF can resume its battle with the Justice Department in federal district court for the release of the opinion. The Justice Department was ordered by the FISA court to respond by June 7 to the motion EFF submitted to the FISA court.

Currently, given the conflicting positions of the Justice Department and the FISA court, Sobel notes, “there is no court you can go to to challenge the secrecy” protecting an opinion noting that the government acted unconstitutionally. On its website, EFF observes, “Granted, it’s likely that some of the information contained within FISC opinions should be kept secret; but, when the government hides court opinions describing unconstitutional government action, America’s national security is harmed: not by disclosure of our intelligence capabilities, but through the erosion of our commitment to the rule of law.”

As news reports emerge about the massive phone records and internet surveillance programs—each of which began during the Bush administration and were carried out under congressional oversight and FISA court review—critics on the left and right have accused the government of going too far in sweeping up data, including information related to Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing. There’s no telling if the 86-page FISA court opinion EFF seeks is directly related to either of these two programs, but EFF’s pursuit of this document shows just how difficult it is—perhaps impossible—for the public to pry from the government information about domestic surveillance gone wrong.

BY MARY KATHARINE HAM

Last we heard of Lisa P. Jackson, she was exiting the administration for new challenges and time with family or something. Her resignation came just weeks before a court-imposed deadline for the EPA to release some 12,000 e-mails associated with her alias e-mail account under the name “Richard Windsor.” Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Chris Horner stumbled on the Windsor account while perusing documents he’d FOIAed while doing research for his book, ” The Liberal War on Transparency.”

Horner and CEI sued EPA for access to Windsor/Jackson’s e-mails, which were otherwise quite easily shielded from FOIA requests for Lisa P. Jackson’s e-mails. The first batch of 3,000 e-mails were to be released this week. EPA released 2,100. The e-mail address from which they came is redacted, but EPA told CNS News they are from the Windsor account. Horner is not satisfied:

Horner said he is dissatisfied with the 2,100 emails the EPA finally delivered to him on Monday. First of all, that number is well short of the promised 3,000, he said.

Furthermore, Horner said he doubts that the emails, which contain the keywords “coal, climate, endanger, and MACT” [Maximum Achievable Control Technology Standards], are from the “Richard Windsor” account.

In its response to Horner, the EPA stated that the emails it released in response to Horner’s FOIA request are from “one secondary official account to conduct EPA business.”

Horner also says the emails are a bunch of nothing: “Perhaps seeking to take the air out of a growing scandal, EPA’s defective compilation boasts an impressively anemic content-to-volume ratio. It starts with Washington Post daily news briefs, then follows with Google alerts for “Lisa Jackson EPA” (none for “Richard Windsor”). Then EPA HQ national news clips. And so on. Rope a dope. Clever. Maybe too much so.”

Horner said the EPA apparently decided it “had to produce a lot of something. Desperate to produce nothing at the same time, it came up with this.”
There are many more e-mails to come. The EPA is supposed to release 3,000 a month for four months, so it’d make sense if they released the most benign ones the closest to Jackson’s exit. The less that comes out before a new EPA head’s confirmation hearing, the less senators can grill her about. One wonders if Christine Gregoire would go by Graham Wellington, or something equally WASPy?

And, no, it is not your imagination that using alternative e-mail addresses to conduct public business seems like a much bigger deal when it’s Republicans doing it.