Hamas turned the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia in the Gaza Strip into a military base, its director Ahmad Kahlot admitted during an investigation conducted by Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, Shin Bet.
The hospital director’s testimony was revealed in a video of the interrogation published by Shin Bet and Israel Defense Forces on Tuesday evening.
Kahlot was among dozens of armed suspects who surrendered and were arrested at the hospital in the northern Gaza Strip on Dec. 12, according to the IDF. Footage of the mass arrest was published two days later.
Kahlot was recruited into Hamas as a high-ranking officer and several of the hospital’s staff served as military operatives of the Hamas organization under him, he said.
According to Kahlot, about 16 of the hospital’s employees served in a double role as Hamas terrorists, including doctors, nurses, paramedics, and clerks.
Hamas terrorists turned the hospital into a military facility, hiding its operatives there, using ambulances for transport and even holding a kidnapped Israeli soldier there.
“They hide in hospitals because they believe that a hospital is a safe place. They will not be harmed if they are inside a hospital,” he stated.
“Hamas has offices inside the hospitals,” Kahlot continued during the interrogation. “There are places for senior officials – they also brought a kidnapped soldier there. There is a designated place for investigations, internal security, and special security. They all have private phone lines inside the hospital.”
Kahlot explained that Hamas has its own private ambulances, with slightly different colors and no license plates. “It was used to bring the kidnapped soldier and to transfer bodies. It comes and goes without transporting the wounded.”
“Once I begged them to take a wounded man to an Indonesian hospital, for healing, for treatment, they refused. Their mission is more important,” the hospital director told Israeli authorities.
“The leaders of Hamas are cowards. They left us on the ground while they’re holing up in hiding places. They destroyed us.”
More than 70 terrorists were arrested during an operation on the grounds of the Kamal Adwan Hospital last week. Several clashes broke out, during which IDF soldiers eliminated more terrorists.
The detainees were taken for interrogation by Israel’s Military Intelligence Unit 504 and Shin Bet coordinators.
In the footage published by the IDF, the terrorists can be seen leaving the hospital premises holding weapons above their heads as a sign of surrender.
In a potential foreshadowing of blocking responses to House Oversight Committee subpoenas, Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., took to X to call out President Joe Biden’s vow to be the most “transparent” president.
“The White House is withholding over 82,000 pages of Joe Biden’s pseudonym emails, refuses to provide proof that Joe loaned his brother money, and now seeks to block the Bidens and former staff from testifying before Congress,” Comer wrote Monday on X, sharing a video from his Newsmax appearance last week.
“@POTUS’s pledge to be transparent was just hot air.”
In that “Wake Up America” appearance, Comer announced Hunter Biden is expected to testify before House investigators before Dec. 4 under the orders of the subpoena. Though Hunter Biden’s lawyers had expressed an eagerness for Hunter Biden to testify, Comer said he has not gotten a reply on his subpoena.
“If President Biden has nothing to hide, then he should make his current and former staff available to testify before Congress about his mishandling of classified documents,” Comer wrote in a statement Friday after receiving a letter from the special counsel to the president that told the committee, in its words: “The White House intends to continue obstructing our investigation.”
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Thursday demanding the Democrat prosecutor provide answers over her indictment of former President Donald Trump and his associates.
“Your indictment and prosecution implicate substantial federal interests, and the circumstances surrounding your actions raise serious concerns about whether they are politically motivated,” the letter reads.
Last week, Willis announced her office would be charging Trump and 18 of his associates for what she claims was an attempt to “conspire[] and endeavor[] to conduct and participate in criminal enterprise” to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Included in the bogus 98-page indictment are several acts Willis contends contributed to the “furtherance” of the so-called conspiracy, such as tweets issued by Trump encouraging people to watch Georgia legislative oversight hearings on TV and a text message asking for phone numbers sent by former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
In their letter to Willis, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee questioned the Fulton County DA’s rationale for charging Trump and his associates and raised several examples indicating her prosecution of the former president is “politically motivated.” Among those cited is Willis’ purported launch of a new campaign fundraising site “that highlighted [her] investigation into President Trump” several days before her office indicted the former commander-in-chief.
Also referenced are public remarks by Emily Kohrs, the forewoman of the special grand jury convened by Willis, who openly bragged during interviews with regime-approved media “about her excitement at the prospect of subpoenaing President Trump and getting to swear him in.” The letter also invoked the decision by Fulton County’s superior court clerk to prematurely release “a list of criminal charges against President Trump reportedly hours before the vote of the grand jury.”
While a statement issued by the court clerk’s office originally claimed the document showing the charges against Trump was “fictitious,” the clerk later asserted it was a “mishap” and that “when [she] hit save, it went to the press queue.”
In explaining their rationale for federal oversight of the Georgia-based indictments, House Republicans referenced Willis’ alleged attempt to “use state criminal law to regulate the conduct of federal officers acting in their official capacities,” such as that of Trump and Meadows. The letter additionally raised questions about the involvement of Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith and whether Willis’ office “coordinated” with Smith “during the course of [her] investigation.”
“News outlets have reported that your office and Mr. Smith ‘interviewed many of the same witnesses and reviewed much of the same evidence’ in reaching your decision to indict President Trump,” the letter reads. “The House Committee on the Judiciary (Committee) thus may investigate whether federal law enforcement agencies or officials were involved in your investigation or indictment.”
As such, House Republicans are demanding Willis turn over any and all documents related to her office’s “receipt and use of federal funds,” communications with the Smith and the DOJ, and communications between her office and any federal agency regarding her investigation into Trump and his associates by Sept. 7.
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
Nearly a dozen current and former officials serving in the White House and Biden administration, including the president’s national security adviser and the secretary of state, have extensive ties to Hunter Biden, who is accused by Republicans of selling access to his father, dating back over a decade.
A Fox News Digital analysis reveals the extent of Hunter’s potential reach in the White House, while the embattled first son is expected to make his first court appearance on July 26 for two alleged misdemeanor tax violations and a felony gun charge.
The Justice Department announced last month that Hunter had entered a plea agreement in the case that will likely keep him out of jail. U.S. Attorney for the District of Delaware David Weiss, who led the investigation, is facing demands from Republicans probing alleged improper retaliation against whistleblowers who claimed the probe was “influenced by politics” and that Weiss was “hamstrung” when making prosecutorial decisions.
The analysis includes two members of Biden’s Cabinet and one former Cabinet member, a top aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a national security adviser, five top Biden White House aides, and a top Biden campaign aide who is currently on leave from her role as a communications director for first lady Jill Biden.
Jake Sullivan
Hunter Biden and President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, served together on the board of the Truman National Security Project, a liberal foreign policy think tank, for roughly two years before Sullivan joined the president’s campaign in 2020.
President Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, left, Hunter Biden, President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Getty Image)
Hunter, who started serving on the board in 2012, and Sullivan both served on the Washington-based nonprofit’s board between 2017 and early 2019, according to internet archives captured by the Wayback Machine.
During that time, Hunter was also serving on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings and the Chinese private equity fund BHR Partners. The federal investigation into Hunter’s foreign business dealings, which is still ongoing, also launched during the same time frame in 2018.
Sullivan was recently accused by former White House official Mike McCormick of being a “conspirator” in the Biden family’s “kickback scheme” in Ukraine when Biden was vice president.
Sullivan denied the allegations, telling reporters that he had nothing to do with such an operation.
Jake Sullivan, left, and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)
Antony Blinken
Secretary of State Antony Blinken held a meeting with Hunter Biden at the State Department in July 2015 when he was serving as the deputy secretary of state in the Obama-Biden administration and Hunter was on Burisma’s board, according to emails previously reviewed and verified by Fox News Digital.
The meeting was two months in the making after Hunter emailed Blinken in late May 2015, asking, “Have a few minutes next week to grab a cup of coffee? I know you are impossibly busy, but would like to get your advice on a couple of things.”
Blinken said “absolutely” and Hunter forwarded Blinken’s full email response to Devon Archer, who was also serving on the Burisma board with him. However, the initial meeting appeared to have been canceled due to the admission of Hunter’s older brother, Beau Biden, to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland because of a recurrence of brain cancer. Beau passed away on May 30, 2015.
Antony Blinken emails with Hunter Biden on May 22, 2015. (Fox News)
Less than two months later, Blinken and Hunter met, prompting Blinken to send a follow-up email saying it was “great to see” Hunter and “catch up.”
“You will love this,” Antony Blinken wrote to Hunter Biden on July 22, 2015, “after you left, Marjorie, the wonderful african american woman who sits in my outer office (and used to be Colin Powell’s assistant) said to me: ‘He sure is pleasant on the eyes.’ Tell you wife. Tony.” (Fox News)
In April of this year, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell testified to the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees that Blinken, as President Biden’s then-campaign senior adviser, “played a role in the inception” of the public statement signed by intelligence officials claiming Hunter’s abandoned laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
Blinken denied having any role in getting the letter signed by members of the intelligence community and claimed, “One of the great benefits of this job is that I don’t do politics and don’t engage in it. But with regard to that letter, I didn’t – it wasn’t my idea, didn’t ask for it, didn’t solicit it.”
Emails from Hunter’s infamous laptop that Blinken allegedly sought to discredit show that Hunter has ties to Blinken and his wife, Evan Ryan, dating back over a decade. Those emails also show that Hunter scheduled meetings with Blinken while he was on the board of Burisma and Blinken was deputy secretary of state.
Multiple profiles pieces over the years said Blinken has advised Biden on more than just foreign policy in his decades-long friendship with the president and serving as a confidant. Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., President Biden’s re-election campaign co-chair, told CNN in 2021, “President Biden is personally close to both Tony Blinken and Evan Ryan and Tony has been an incredibly loyal, capable and effective adviser, staffer and personal friend of the sort that is rare in Washington.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Hunter Biden (Getty Images)
Evan Ryan
Evan Ryan, Blinken’s wife who is currently serving as White House cabinet secretary, communicated frequently with Hunter and his longtime business partner, Eric Schwerin, when she was working at the White House during the Obama-Biden administration.
Hunter tried to connect with Blinken on June 16, 2010, when he asked Ryan for his non-government email address, according to emails. Ryan, who also worked on Biden’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, then provided Blinken’s personal email address to Hunter.
It appears that Hunter Biden tried to connect with Antony Blinken on June 16, 2010, when he asked Blinken’s wife, Evan Ryan, for his non-government email address. (Fox News)
White House visitor logs also show that Schwerin, who was the president of Hunter Biden’s investment firm Rosemont Seneca Partners for several years, met with Ryan at the White House’s Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) in October 2010.
She was also in communication with Hunter and Schwerin about a couple of White House events that year, including the Mexico State Dinner and the annual “Easter Egg Roll.”
“OVP has 250 tix to the Easter Egg Roll and your Mom has an additional 200. Family, etc is coming out of your Mom’s allotment,” Schwerin said in the email to Hunter, referring to Blinken’s wife. “Evan is handling your Dad’s and we can pass on names to her for outreach purposes. Let’s discuss. I don’t think we have 50 spots, but if we had 20 or so names we’d probably be fine.”
Eric Schwerin sent Hunter Biden an email about two upcoming White House events and mentioned that he talked with Evan Ryan, Blinken’s wife, about tickets to the events. (Fox News)
“More importantly, OVP has 12 spots to fill for the Mexico State Dinner in May and needs to send in their names by Monday,” he continued. “Evan is looking for any suggestions. Hispanic Americans or just any outreach related suggestions. Obviously they won’t have trouble filling this number but is still looking for suggestions.”
A couple of months later, Hunter and Ryan exchanged emails about the Mexico State dinner guest list, and she sent him the seating chart for his table.
(Fox News)
Evan Ryan and Antony Blinken have ties to Hunter Biden dating back over a decade. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Fox News Digital previously reported several other ties between Hunter and Ryan.
Jeff Zients
White House chief of staff Jeff Zients, who led the federal COVID-19 pandemic response between early 2021 and April 2022, met Hunter multiple times in 2016, according to emails and White House visitor logs.
Zients met with Hunter Biden twice in February 2016 and on another occasion in May 2016, just months before Biden, the vice president at the time, was set to leave the White House.
Former Joe Biden aide Anne Marie Muldoon invites Hunter Biden to a meeting with Zients and his father in July 2016. (Fox News)
Hunter Biden’s former business partner Joan Mayer sends him his schedule on Feb. 12. It includes a meeting with his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, Jeff Zients and David Rubenstein. (Fox News)
Biden attended the first two meetings, which both took place at the U.S. Naval Observatory, where the vice presidential residence is located.
Hunter Biden’s business partner Joan Meyer sends him his schedule on Feb. 23. (Fox News)
Additionally, Anne Marie Muldoon, who was an assistant for then-Vice President Biden between 2014-2017, sent Hunter Biden an invitation to attend a potential fourth meeting with his father, Zients, David Bradley, a Washington, D.C.-based political consultant and chairman of media group Atlantic Media, and Eric Lander at the Naval Observatory on July 12, 2016. While it is unclear whether Hunter Biden joined the meeting, Muldoon sent him a copy of the meeting agenda after it took place.
Kathy Chung
Kathy Chung, who is currently serving as the Pentagon’s deputy director of protocol, communicated frequently with Hunter when she was serving as Biden’s executive assistant during the Obama administration.
Throughout much of her five-year tenure working for Biden, Chung regularly shared information with Hunter about his father’s schedule and passed messages directly from the then-vice president, according to emails.
Chung’s relationship with Hunter also appears to date back to before she worked for his father. The emails showed that Hunter recommended Chung for the executive assistant role when the previous holder of the job, Michele Smith, departed the White House in the spring of 2012.
A month after Chung thanked Hunter for “thinking” of her and getting her to apply for a job in the vice president’s office, Chung emailed Hunter Biden informing him that she had been offered the job.
Kathy Chung informs Hunter Biden that Vice President Biden had selected her to be his executive assistant. (Fox News)
“I cannot thank you enough for thinking about me and walking me thru this,” she said. “What an incredible opportunity! Thanks, Hunter!!”
In another email exchange shortly after the Obama-Biden administration concluded, Hunter suggested that Chung come work at his company. It does not appear that she ever joined Hunter’s company.
Hunter Biden tells Kathy Chung she should work for him in February 2017, adding that he can “make everyone money.” (Fox News)
Chung made headlines in January after she was reportedly questioned by federal investigators as part of the probe into the president’s handling of classified documents.
Ron Klain
Biden’s former White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, who stepped down in February, previously served as the chief of staff for Vice President Biden until the end of January 2011. In September 2012, Klain reached out to Hunter for help in raising $20,000 for the Vice President’s Residence Foundation (VPRF), telling him to “keep this low low key” to prevent “bad PR,” according to emails Fox News Digital previously reported on.
“The tax lawyers for the VP Residence Foundation have concluded that since the Cheney folks last raised money in 2007 and not 2008, we actually have to have some incoming funds before the end of this fiscal year (i.e., before 9/30/12 – next week) to remain eligible to be a ‘public charity,'” Klain, who had left his chief of staff position in Vice President Biden’s office a year earlier but was the foundation’s chairman at the time, said in an email to Hunter.
“It’s not much – we need to raise a total of $20,000 – so I’m hitting up a few very close friends on a very confidential basis to write checks of $2,000 each,” Klain continued. “We need to keep this low low key, because raising money for the Residence now is bad PR – but it has to be done, so I’m trying to just collect the 10 checks of $2,000, get it done in a week, and then, we can do an event for the Residence Foundation after the election.”
Hunter then forwarded the email to Schwerin, who helped manage a majority of Hunter’s finances, and the two discussed donating to the foundation, though it’s not clear what was ultimately decided.
Klain’s career with Biden dates back to his failed presidential campaign in 1988 and serving as counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Former White House chief of staff Ron Klain (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander, the communications director for first lady Jill Biden who went on temporary leave in May to help lead the messaging arm of Biden’s re-election campaign, also has ties to Hunter.
In 2014, Alexander, who served as Biden’s spokesperson when he was a senator and the vice president, reached out to praise Hunter for his statement after he was kicked out of Navy Reserve for testing positive for cocaine.
“Hey Hunter – just wanted to write you a quick note to say David and I are thinking of you,” she wrote in an email. “Your statement was perfect and gracious. Sending you a virtual hug from both of us and hoping you can get some peace this weekend.”
Alexander is married to David Wade, a former State Department staffer who helped advise Hunter with rapid response as he was receiving increased public scrutiny regarding his lucrative position with Burisma.
Emails uncovered by Fox News Digital last month showed Hunter’s firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners, was paying Wade for communications consulting, and he strategized with Hunter and his partners on how to respond to inquiries by the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
Wade has visited the White House at least five times during Biden’s presidency, according to visitor logs.
Annie Tomasini
Annie Tomasini, an assistant to the president and the current director of Oval Office operations, was in frequent communication with Hunter, referred to him as her “brother” and often ended her emails with “LY” for “love you,” according to emails dating from 2010 to 2016.
Biden publicly announced on Dec. 20, 2010, that Tomasini was stepping down to take a position with Harvard University, and Tomasini kept Hunter clued in on the details of that position before she took it, according to emails. The month prior, on Nov. 19, 2010, she forwarded information to Hunter about Harvard’s employee benefits and added, “Thanks.”
Annie Tomasini, director of Oval Office operations, left, follows President Biden on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One on May 17, 2023. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Hey – I looked at benefits And they look pretty amazing. Any word on comp?” Hunter responded on Nov. 23, 2010.
“I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for looking at all the background Hunt,” Tomasini replied.
Tomasini was offered the job on Nov. 30, 2010, writing to Hunter, “Director of intergovernmental relations. > 120k ish – may be a little higher.”
She later thanked him and said she was going to tell his father the news. Months later, Hunter gave a speech at Harvard, but not before running the draft by Tomasini first.
Tomasini has accompanied Biden and Hunter to Camp David twice in the past few weeks.
Michael Donilon, a current senior adviser to Biden who served as his chief campaign strategist in 2020, was on dozens of emails with Hunter and other members of Biden’s inner circle coordinating strategy meetings throughout the 2012 campaign, mulling over a 2016 presidential bid, and later plotting Biden’s endeavors post-vice presidency.
In August 2015, Schwerin shared a Politico article with Hunter that says Donilon and a few other advisers from Biden’s inner circle, including Hunter, are the only ones “involved in the real decision-making.”
An email from February 2016 showed that Hunter, Donilon and a few others were also involved in the planning stages for the Biden Foundation. And shortly after Biden left office in 2017, Hunter, Donilon and others in his inner circle were invited to a meeting at Biden’s residence in McLean, Virginia, according to emails.
Days later Hunter, Donilon and several others were invited to a meeting at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home where classified documents were recently discovered. The meeting took place on Feb. 7, 2017, the same day it was announced that the former vice president would be leading the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where classified documents were also found, and the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware.
Donilon accompanied Biden a few months ago on the trip to Ireland, which included Hunter and Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens.
Steve Ricchetti
Steve Ricchetti, who currently serves as Biden’s White House counselor, was also on dozens of emails with Hunter dealing with strategy meetings and helping Biden with post-VP life.
Fox News Digital reported last year that Schwerin visited the White House at least eight times in 2016, meeting with Ricchetti at least twice when he was serving as Biden’s chief of staff.
Morell, the former CIA deputy director who testified in April, said he received a call in October 2020 from Ricchetti, who was serving as the chairman of Biden’s campaign at the time, following the final debate against then-President Donald Trump, when Biden said the Hunter laptop was a “Russian plant” and a “bunch of garbage.”
Morell said the call from Ricchetti was to thank him for spearheading the letter signed by intelligence officials that tried to debunk the laptop.
Steve Ricchetti, counselor to the president, gestures after playing a round of golf with President Biden at Wilmington Country Club in Delaware on April 17, 2021. (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)
Louisa Terrell
Louisa Terrell, who is serving as assistant to the president and the director of the Office of Legislative Affairs, communicated with Hunter dozens of times during the Obama-Biden administration, with some of the correspondence including Schwerin on the emails.
In February 2014, Terrell emailed Hunter and Schwerin, saying, “So nice to catch up over lunch – thank you. Enjoy the snow day and talk soon.”
Louisa Terrell, White House legislative affairs director, walks with Steve Ricchetti to a House Democrat caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 31, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Another email chain from late 2014 through early 2015 shows that she reached out to Hunter for help in getting her daughter into Sidwell Friends School, one of the most expensive and elite PK-12 schools in the country, which includes both of former President Obama’s daughters and some of Biden’s grandchildren as alumni.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak with Sidwell about Olivia’s application to next year’s 7th grade class. I recognize how busy you are and appreciate you making the time to chime in with Bryan,” Terrell said in February 2015. “Below is some logistical information and some background on why Olivia is a good fit for Sidwell. Let me know if this is helpful and/or you need some additional information.”
“[Bryan] was very cordial/ nice – sent me two emails – one saying he received my message and email and a second that was more personal acknowledging that he also spoke to Chris and others who had weighed in on behalf of Olivia and he hopes it all works out etc…” Hunter said. “Very nice – looking forward to having dinner sometime soon – but didn’t give any thing up in the way of real information.”
Less than two weeks later, Terrell emailed Hunter saying her daughter got into Sidwell and added, “Thank you so so much for your help. I hope you know how much I appreciate it. Thank you, thank you!”
Terrell has worked for Biden going back as early as 2001 and served a two-year stint as executive director at the Biden Foundation, according to her LinkedIn profile.
The White House, Biden’s campaign and Hunter Biden’s lawyer did not respond to Fox News Digital’s requests for comment.
Fox News’ Joe Schoffstall and Thomas Catenacci contributed to this report.
Jessica Chasmar is a digital writer on the politics team for Fox News and Fox Business. Story tips can be sent to Jessica.Chasmar@fox.com.
Special counsel Jack Smith, the prosecutor behind the indictment of former President Donald Trump and the investigation into sensitive national security documents being kept at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida, has spent more than $9 million since taking on the assignment late last year, according to Department of Justice figures released Friday.
Smith has spent about $5.4 million on personnel, rent, and other costs from his own budget and brought about another $3.8 million in spending by other DOJ agencies in the four months after he was picked last November to lead the investigation and other probes involving alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, reports Politico.
The report only accounts for Smith’s spending through March and does not include the period leading up to Trump’s indictment in June or the increased activity in the election investigation, as the special counsel started the process for a second Florida grand jury.
Part of the $3.8 million includes the cost for Smith’s security detail in the high-profile investigations, the report said.
When Smith was brought on, the investigations involving Trump had already been underway. He kept most of the staff that was already involved but added more prosecutors in recent months.
The report doesn’t include how much the DOJ had already spent on the probes before bringing on Smith.
The special counsel, who had headed the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, left his job in Europe, where he was prosecuting war crimes, and returned to Washington to take over the investigations on Trump.
Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Hur, who was appointed in January to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents spent $615,000 through March, with the DOJ incurring another $572,000 in expenses, according to another report.
John Durham, the special counsel appointed to examine the origins of the Russian conspiracy probe involving Trump’s first election campaign spent $1.11 million in the six months before March 31 while wrapping up his investigation of the FBI, with the DOJ adding in another $59,000.
A physician who serves as a Minnesota state senator announced this month that his state’s Board of Medical Practice is investigating him following his criticism in April that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidelines on the classification of coronavirus deaths could artificially inflate counts.
Dr. Scott Jensen (R) tweeted on July 6 that his video message was the “most important” he has done.
The physician said the Board of Medical Practice wrote to him that he was under investigation because of allegations he has been “spreading misinformation in regards to the completion of death certificates on a news program,” and “providing reckless advice” in a comparison between COVID-19 and the flu.
In April, Jensen appeared on Fox News with host Laura Ingraham, who read guidelines developed by CDC for completing death certificates.
“In cases where a definite diagnosis of COVID-19 cannot be made, but it is suspected or likely (e.g., the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty), it is acceptable to report COVID-19 on a death certificate as ‘probable’ or ‘presumed,’” Ingraham read from the guidelines, emphasizing they appeared to concede how the death certificates are completed is a “judgment call.”
Jensen responded the CDC guidance was “ridiculous.”
“The idea that we’re going to allow people to massage and sort of game the numbers is a real issue,” he continued, “Because we’re gonna undermine the trust and, right now, as we see politicians doing things that aren’t necessarily motivated in fact and in science, the public’s … trust in politicians is already wearing thin.”
During the broadcast, Jensen also provided a hypothetical example of a patient who died due to influenza, with symptoms of cough and fever, but who would have the primary cause of death as “respiratory arrest.”
“I’ve never been encouraged to [notate ‘influenza’],” he said. “I would probably write ‘respiratory arrest’ to be the top line, and the underlying cause of this disease would be pneumonia … I might well put emphysema or congestive heart failure, but I would never put influenza down as the underlying cause of death and yet that’s what we are being asked to do here.”
Jensen added that, under the CDC guidelines, a patient who died after a bus accident, but then tested positive for coronavirus, would still be counted as having presumed to have died from the virus.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said.
Ingraham also played a clip of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s response during a briefing to a question about the possibility of coronavirus deaths being “padded.” Fauci replied there are often “conspiracy theories” during “challenging” times in public health crises.
Jensen responded by observing that hospitals receive greater reimbursements for patients being treated for coronavirus.
The senator said in his recent video that he believes he has been “targeted,” but that he intends to cooperate with the investigation.
He received a statement of support from Minnesota Senate Majority Leader Paul Gazelka:
Of course I support Dr. Jensen and his medical expertise on COVID because he has proven to be right. USA Today fact-checked and verified Sen. Jensen’s claim that federal payments were greater if patients were confirmed to have COVID.
Gazelka added he is exploring “whether or not the board is compelled to investigate every complaint or if they are choosing to investigate Dr. Jensen.”
“It’s also concerning there are two separate complaints, raising questions about coordination,” the statement continued. “Legislators should not have to fear regulators based on their speech. If the bureaucratic state can silence speech through investigations, we have very dark times ahead for our democracy.”
James Clapper was speaking with Anderson Cooper shortly after learning about the criminal investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham when Cooper asked him about it. You can clearly see that Clapper is very unsettled and nervous about the whole thing, which he should be. He knows that he did wrong and he knows that he’s about to get caught. His behavior and body language says it all. You begin hearing a lot more ‘uhs’ and is constantly moving in his seat, and seems to avoid looking straight into the camera.
The idea that this investigation is politically timed is nonsense. Clapper makes that assertion and Cooper offers zero push back because of course he doesn’t. The reality is that the Durham investigation started long before impeachment fever 2019. And the escalation to a criminal investigation follows the finishing of a years in the making IG report, not the impeachment inquiry. If anything, the timing of the whistle-blower and Schiff’s circus seem far more politically timed than the investigations that predate it.
Two, Clapper knows exactly why he’s under investigation. He has always been suspected of leaking the classified briefing given to Donald Trump on the Steele dossier to CNN. I wrote an entire piece several months ago about Jake Tapper’s denials not adding up on the matter. There are some serious questions and inconsistencies there. There’s also the fact that Clapper probably lied about his knowledge of the investigation. The idea that he didn’t even know it existed prior to Trump taking office doesn’t begin to pass the smell test. We have texts from Peter Stzok and Lisa Page saying that everything was being run from the White House. Clapper was the ODNI in that administration. He knew.
The status of the new investigation means Durham can now subpoena witnesses and file charges. The probe’s expansion to a criminal investigation was based on new evidence that was found during a recent trip to Rome with Attorney General Bill Barr.
It’s no secret that liberals across the country have tried desperately to stop Donald Trump since he became a candidate, but their efforts to undermine him may now be coming back at themselves like a boomerang.
A scandal which began before the 2016 election was even held has just exploded, at least if a bombshell report from the watchdog group Judicial Watch is accurate. The organization has been diligently unraveling the facts around Fusion GPS, and what they recently found is jaw-dropping.
Fusion GPS, of course, is the “opposition research” firm which was contracted by the DNC to dig up dirt on Trump in the run-up to the election. The company is linked to the infamous dossier containing scandalous — and thoroughly debunked — claims about the president, but the controversy is much wider than just those papers.
It now appears that someone working for Fusion GPS was purposely and frequently collaborating with a deputy attorney general within the Obama administration, sending anti-Trump material in a way that was certainly unethical if not completely illegal.
The Obama-era official is Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and the anti-Trump figure working for Fusion GPS was his wife.
“[A] series of ‘Hi Honey’ emails from Nellie Ohr to her high-ranking federal prosecutor husband and his colleagues raise the prospect that Hillary Clinton-funded opposition research was being funneled into the Justice Department during the 2016 election through a back-door marital channel,”explained veteran investigative journalist John Solomon for The Hill.
“Ohr has admitted to Congress that, during the 2016 presidential election, she worked for Fusion GPS — the firm hired by Democratic nominee Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to perform political opposition research,” the journalist said.
That kind of research is often used by political campaigns against their opponents, and is not by itself off limits. But Judicial Watch uncovered 339 emails which reveal that Nellie Ohr likely crossed the line by using her marriage as a political tool, and sending pages of anti-Trump research directly to official Department of Justice email accounts.
“They clearly show that Ohr sent reams of open-source intelligence to her husband, Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, and on some occasions to at least three DOJ prosecutors: Lisa Holtyn, Ivana Nizich and Joseph Wheatley,”Solomon said.
“Such overt political content flowing into the email accounts of a DOJ charged with the nonpartisan mission of prosecuting crimes is jarring enough. It raises additional questions about potential conflicts of interest when it is being injected by a spouse working as a Democratic contractor trying to defeat Trump,”he continued.
But the scandal is deeper than just emails. Nellie and Bruce Ohr apparently had key roles in pushing the debunked Trump dossier and the false narrative that the future president was colluding with Russia.
“For instance, just 24 days after the anti-Trump screed was emailed, both Ohrs met in Washington with British intelligence operative Christopher Steele,” Solomon said. “She said she learned that Steele had concerns that he hoped the DOJ or FBI would investigate, with help from her husband.”
And that appears to be exactly what happened.
“The next day, Bruce Ohr used his official DOJ position to go to then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe with Steele’s allegations (later to become known as the Steele dossier), and the bureau opened its first investigation into Russia collusion,” he said.
There are obvious parallels to Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI officials who were also having an affair all while texting back and forth about how Trump should be stopped. More and more, it looks like partisan politics and anti-Trump collaboration was widespread within agencies which are supposed to be unbiased.
That is the real scandal here: Not that liberals tried to uncover dirt on a candidate, but that official government personnel within our own government eagerly participated in the partisan witch hunt.
It looks like there was collusion, but not by Trump.
Instead, the real collusion took place between Obama-era government officials and activists who saw nothing as off limits in order to install Hillary Clinton as president — and that should alarm every American, no matter their party.
Benjamin Arie is an independent journalist and writer. He has personally covered everything ranging from local crime to the U.S. president as a reporter in Michigan, before focusing on national politics. Ben frequently travels to Latin America and has spent years living in Mexico. Follow Benjamin on Facebook
Conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh said he believes special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation was launched to “cover-up” the misdeeds within the Justice Department, including the FBI’s attempted “coup” against President Donald Trump.
During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Limbaugh was asked to respond to former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s account that he was involved with a discussion with Justice Department Deputy Director Rod Rosenstein in May 2017 regarding invoking the 25th Amendment to have Trump removed from office.
Fox News host Chris Wallace asked the commentator why he described this revelation as evidence of a “silent coup.”
“Because these people are unelected,” Limbaugh answered. “They took it upon themselves to overthrow the election results of 2016, ignoring the potential real collusion and conspiracy between Democrats and Russians to undermine the Trump candidacy and the Trump presidency.”
“We’re losing sight of what happened here,” he continued. “People unelected simply because they don’t like the guy’s hairstyle or where he came from decided the American people’s decision was invalid and began a systematic process to get him thrown out of office. This is a silent coup.”
Limbaugh contended that those involved in these discussions are the ones who ought to be under investigation and going to jail.
“The Mueller investigation, I believe, is a cover-up of all of that. It’s to distract everybody’s attention,” he said. “This is one of the greatest political hoaxes that has ever be perpetrated on the people of this country.”
The conservative icon said the prosecution of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and others affiliated with the campaign for process crimes is all “designed to make it look like there was some kind of collusion between Trump and Russia.”
Limbaugh noted that no one has been prosecuted to date for the stated purpose of Mueller’s probe, which was to examine Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election, including whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow. Many political observers, including Fox News host Sean Hannity, have pointed to the special counsel’s apparent lack of interest in investigating the origin and use of the so-called Trump Russia dossier as proof that Mueller is overseeing a one-side, agenda-driven probe.
The dossier, which was funded by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign, was reportedly used to help obtain FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign.
Limbaugh said that a primary goal of Mueller’s investigation was to be the vehicle used to justify impeaching Trump, but now it is aimed toward the 2020 election and driving down the president’s approval numbers.
Trump tweeted on Monday, “Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe. He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught.”
He added in a second tweet, “There is a lot of explaining to do to the millions of people who had just elected a president who they really like and who has done a great job for them with the Military, Vets, Economy and so much more. This was the illegal and treasonous ‘insurance policy’ in full action!”
The Department of Justice’s inspector general released a report last April concluding that McCabe “lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the (Wall Street Journal)” in violation of FBI policy, and that his “disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.”
The OIG made a criminal referral to the DOJ regarding McCabe’s alleged lies to federal investigators.
In March 2018, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe based on the OIG’s findings two days before he was slated to retire.
McCabe came under increased scrutiny following the release of text messages by the inspector general in December 2017 between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
In the texts, Strzok described Trump during the 2016 campaign as a “loathsome human” and an “idiot,” and found the prospect of him being president “terrifying.”
Page, who was having an affair with Strzok, texted him, “There is no way (Trump) gets elected.”
Strzok then replied, “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office … that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk.
“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”
Randy DeSoto is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”
When gay black actor Jussie Smollett said he was attacked by white men who yelled some stuff about “MAGA,” it didn’t take long for the liberal rage machine to mobilize.
“The star of the tv show ‘Empire,’ Jussie Smollett, was attacked by two assailants early Monday morning in Downtown Chicago according to Chicago Police Department Spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi,” CNN reported.
“Smollett, 36, was walking on the 300 block of E. North Lower Water Street when two men approached him and ‘gained his attention by yelling out racial and homophobic slurs towards him,’ Guglielmi says in a statement.
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“Two unknown offenders — it is unknown if they were male or female — then attacked Smollett, hitting him in the face and then poured an unknown chemical substance on him.
“At some point during the scuffle, one of the offenders wrapped a rope around the victim’s neck and then both offenders fled the scene, the statement reads.”
Smollett took himself to Northwestern Hospital, where the incident was reported to police, according to CBS Chicago.
There was plenty of condemnation to go around, particularly after TMZ reported that the attackers had shouted “this is MAGA country.” Two of the outraged included black Democratic senators, who just by chance, happen to either be running for president or widely expected to be running for president.
There was one problem with this “modern-day lynching”narrative: None of that “MAGA country” stuff was originally mentioned to police and they’re having trouble corroborating the fact that the attack even happened.
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“According to the victim, the offenders’ faces were concealed,” a police spokesman said, according to Reason. “We have no record indicating that (they shouted ‘MAGA’), we only have record of them shouting racial and homophobic slurs at him.”
A statement from Chicago Police confirmed that, Reason reported.
“We have no record of the ‘MAGA Country’ comment,” the statement said, according to Reason. “We have racial and homophobic comments documented.”
CNN reported that when police heard about the accusation and called the actor, he “relayed it to detectives in a supplemental interview.”
But then again, there’s some doubt as to whether the attack even happened.
In an area that has a “very high density”of surveillance cameras, according to the police spokesman’s statement, there is not a single image of an attack like the one Smollett described.
“A Chicago police spokesperson tells CNN that investigators canvassed the neighborhood where the reported attack occurred on actor Jussie Smollett and have found no still images or video from security cameras of the incident,” CNN reported.
“The only image of Smollett police obtained from security cameras was inside Subway Sandwich shop near the location of the reported crime, the actor was standing alone.”
For all I know, Smollett really was attacked by bigots who shouted the phrase “MAGA country,” and ambitious, Democratic politicians who are calling this a “a modern-day lynching” are absolutely justified. But here’s the thing — I’m going to wait to see whether or not that’s the case, as everyone else should have.
It hasn’t even been a fortnight since the Covington Catholic incident, and the lesson we were should have taken away from that “teachable moment” — be careful dealing with stories that confirm your cultural narrative— has been lost.
No fewer than two senators with eyes on the 2020 Democratic nomination have taken this accusation as gospel because they can use it as an illustration of supposed Trump-fueled hate coursing through the country, even though no arrests have been made and the evidence is scanty. If this turns out to be a hoax, Sens. Booker and Harris own this,as do the legion of liberals who tweeted this out without waiting for a fuller investigation.
Even if this turns out to be true, what they did was supremely irresponsible. That these two individuals are in the Senate is bad enough. Just imagine one of them in the White House, backed by a legion of people who think Donald Trump supporters are irresponsible bigots, but are willing to blame white Donald Trump supporters for a hate crime without any charges or even direct physical evidence. It will make the Obama years look like pure reason.
In this Oct. 7, 2008, file photo, Jerome Corsi, right, arrives at the immigration department in Nairobi, Kenya. (AP Photo)
Conservative author Jerome Corsi filed a “criminal and ethics” complaint against special counsel Robert Mueller on Monday, alleging his team threatened prosecution if Corsi refused to provide false testimony against Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.
Fox News reported the 78-page complaint, filed with the Department of Justice and the DOJ’s inspector general, stated “Dr. Corsi has been criminally threatened and coerced to tell a lie and call it the truth.”
The filing also calls for the removal of Mueller and his prosecutors for their misconduct.
“Special Counsel Mueller and his prosecutorial staff should respectfully be removed from his office and their practice of the law and a new Special Counsel appointed who respects and will obey common and accepted norms of professional ethics and the law and who will promptly conclude the so-called Russian collusion investigation which had been illegally and criminally spinning out of control,” the document reads.
According to his complaint, Mueller’s team wanted Corsi to testify to acting as a liaison between Trump campaign associate Roger Stone and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange regarding the release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. The filing reads that Mueller’s office “knowingly and deceitfully threatening to charge Dr. Corsi with an alleged false statement,” unless he gives them “false testimony”against Trump and others.
Corsi announced last week on multiple media outlets that he would not sign Mueller’s agreement calling for him to plead guilty to one count of perjury.
“They can put me in prison the rest of my life. I am not going to sign a lie,”the 72-year-old told CNN.
According to a court filing by Mueller’s team, Corsi wrote in a short email to Stone in July 2016, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps. One shortly after I’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”
“Time to let more than (Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta) to be exposed as in bed w enemy if they are not ready to drop HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton),” “The Obama Nation” author added. “That appears to be the game hackers are now about.”
Corsi explained to Fox News host Tucker Carlson last week that he had fully cooperated with Mueller’s investigators, turning over his computer and cellphone, but he initially forgot about the email, until it was brought to his attention. He amended his statement to Mueller’s team in September, which they accepted without complaint, but prosecutors changed their tune after they determined, he “could not give them what they wanted,” according to Corsi.
“They do this what I call a perjury trap,” Corsi told Carlson. “They ask you a question. They have material they won’t show you. You’ve forgotten about. They say, ‘You’ve just lied,’ because this email you’ve forgotten about 2016 proves your current memory is wrong. It’s a memory test.”
In a statement on Monday, his attorney Larry Klayman charged Mueller with “effectively seeking to overthrow a duly elected president” through coercing false testimony.
“This rogue government tyranny perpetrated by a Special Counsel and his prosecutorial staff, which is designed to effectively overthrow a duly elected president by coercing and extorting false testimony from Dr. Corsi and others, cannot be permitted in a civilized society,”he said.
Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz argued last week that Mueller’s probe is creating crimes rather than uncovering past ones, and that the “devastating” report against Trump he will write will be based on people “who have lied.”
“Virtually all of his indictments and pleas come from people who he got to lie in front of investigators by setting perjury traps for them,”Dershowitz told Fox News host Sean Hannity. He added, “(A)nd the other ones have to do with financial dealings unrelated to the president. Where’s the beef? Where’s the crime?”
Randy DeSoto is a graduate of West Point and Regent University School of Law. He is the author of the book “We Hold These Truths” and screenwriter of the political documentary “I Want Your Money.”
FBI agents raided the home of a recognized Department of Justice whistleblower who privately delivered documents pertaining to the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One to a government watchdog, according to the whistleblower’s attorney.
The Justice Department’s inspector general was informed that the documents show that federal officials failed to investigate potential criminal activity regarding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation and Rosatom, the Russian company that purchased Uranium One, a document reviewed by The Daily Caller News Foundation alleges.
The delivered documents also show that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller failed to enforce criminal laws pertaining to Rosatom and to other Russian government entities attached toUranium One, the document reviewed by TheDCNF alleges.
Mueller is now the special counsel investigating whether Donald Trump’s presidential campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election.
“The bureau raided my client to seize what he legally gave Congress about the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One,”the whistleblower’s lawyer, Michael Socarras, told TheDCNF, noting that he considered the FBI’s raid to be an “outrageous disregard”of whistleblower protections.
Sixteen agents arrived at the home of Dennis Nathan Cain, a former FBI contractor, on the morning of Nov. 19 and raided his Union Bridge, Maryland, home, Socarras told TheDCNF. The raid was permitted by a court order signed on Nov. 15 by Magistrate Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher in the U.S. District Court for Baltimore and obtained by TheDCNF.
A special agent from the FBI’s Baltimore division, who led the raid, charged that Cain possessed stolen federal property and demanded entry to his private residence, Socarras told TheDCNF.
“On Nov. 19, the FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity in the Union Bridge, Maryland area,” bureau spokesman Dave Fitz told TheDCNF. “At this time, we have no further comment.”
Cain informed the agent while he was still at the door that he was a recognized protected whistleblower under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act and that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz recognized his whistleblower status, according to Socarras. Cain further told the FBI agent the potentially damaging classified information had been properly transmitted to the Senate and House Intelligence committees as permitted under the act, Socarras said. The agent immediately directed his agents to begin a sweep of the suburban home anyway.
Frightened and intimidated, Cain promptly handed over the documents, Socarras told TheDCNF. Yet even after surrendering the information to the FBI, the agents continued to rummage through the home for six hours.
“After asking and getting my approval to do so, DOJ IG Michael Horowitz had a member of his staff physically take Mr. Cain’s classified document disclosure to the House and Senate Intelligence committees,” Socarras told TheDCNF.
“For the bureau to show up at Mr. Cain’s home suggesting that those same documents are stolen federal property, and then proceed to seize copies of the same documents after being told at the house door that he is a legally protected whistleblower who gave them to Congress, is an outrageous disregard of the law,” he continued.
Cain came across the potentially explosive information while working for an FBI contractor, Socarras told TheDCNF. Cain met with a senior member of Horowitz’s office at a church close to the White House to deliver the documents to the IG, according to Socarras. He sat in a pew with a hoodie and sunglasses, Socarras said. Cain held a double-sealed envelope containing a flash drive with the documents. The IG official met him and, without saying a word, took the pouch over Cain’s shoulder and left.
If the complaint is found credible, the law protecting whistleblowers, which covers employees of government contractors, requires the IG to share such information with the attorney general — who at the time was Jeff Sessions. The two law enforcement officials directed the documents be sent to the Senate and House Intelligence committees for their examination, according to Socarras, who said that a high-level IG official hand-delivered the documents to the two intelligence committees.
“I cannot believe the bureau informed the federal magistrate who approved the search warrant that they wanted to search the home of an FBI whistleblower to seize the information that he confidentially disclosed to the IG and Congress,”Socarras told TheDCNF.
The whistleblower act is intended to protect whistleblowers within the intelligence community, which includes the FBI.
“The (intelligence community) is committed to providing its personnel the means to report violations of law,” according to a 2016 intelligence community directive.
“The (whistleblower act) authorizes employees of contractors to take government property and give it to the two intelligence committees confidentially,” Socarras told TheDCNF.
The FBI has yet to talk to Cain’s attorney despite the raid, according to Socarras.
“After the raid, and having received my name and phone number from Mr. Cain as his lawyer, an FBI agent actually called my client directly to discuss his seized electronics,” Socarras told TheDCNF. “Knowingly bypassing the lawyer of a represented client is serious misconduct.”
A spokesman for the IG declined to comment.
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
Founded by Tucker Carlson, a 25-year veteran of print and broadcast media, and Neil Patel, former chief policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, The Daily Caller News Foundation is a 501(c)(3) non-profit providing original investigative reporting from a team of professional reporters that operates for the public benefit.
Christine Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee. (ABC News screen shot)
And so the Brett Kavanaugh scandal has ended — not with a bang, but a whimper. That could change, of course, if Democrats continue their crusade to remove the judge should they take the Senate after midterms. But as far as the original accuser goes? Christine Blasey Ford is throwing in the towel.
Ford’s lawyers have toldCNNthat their client “absolutely does not want him (Kavanaugh) impeached if Democrats take control of Congress.”
Debra Katz, one of Ford’s attorneys, told CNN that Ford has done everything she originally sought to do.
“Professor Ford has not asked for (Democrats to continue investigating Kavanaugh.) What she did was to come forward and testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and agree to cooperate with any investigation by the FBI and that’s what she sought to do here,” Katz said.
Ford was thrust into the national spotlight after she accused then-Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh of sexual assault at a party while the two were in high school. Countless accusations and investigations ultimately yielded nothing, and Kavanaugh was sworn in as the 114th Supreme Court justice on Saturday after a 50-48 Senate vote.
Some prominent Democrats, such as House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jerry Nadler, have made no secret of Democrats’ desires to further investigate Kavanaugh should Democrats have a successful midterm.
“If he is on the Supreme Court, and the Senate hasn’t investigated, then the House will have to,”Nadler toldABC News’ George Stephanopoulos. “We would have to investigate any credible allegations of perjury and other things that haven’t been properly looked into before.”
Nadler’s statements fly directly in the face of Ford’s desires. Considering the accusations that Democrats willfully ignored Ford’s request for anonymity, it’s not exactly surprising that Democrats might ignore her requests again.
“She does not want (Kavanaugh) to be impeached?”CNN’s Dana Bash asked Ford’s lawyers.
“No,”Katz bluntly responded.
It’s totally understandable that Ford wants this ordeal finished and tucked away. Another Ford lawyer, Lisa Banks, stressed that Ford wanted closure but had no regrets.
“I don’t think she has any regrets. I think she feels like she did the right thing,”Banks said.
“And this was what she wanted to do, which was provide this information to the committee so they could make the best decision possible. And I think she still feels that was the right thing to do, so I don’t think she has any regrets.”
Katz hinted that she wasn’t thrilled with how everything played out, but still supported Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s handling of the accusations.
“What I can speak to is when victims of sexual assault and violence go to their Congress people — when they go to their senators and they ask for their information to be confidential, I think that that’s a request that needs to be respected,”Katz said.
“Victims get to control when and how and where their allegations get made public,” she added. “Now, if we want to look at all the things that went wrong in this process, there are many. There are many issues that need to be addressed. But I think Sen. Feinstein respected the process of her constituents, and I think that was the right thing to do.”
It’s certainly up for debate whether or not Feinstein actually “respected the process of her constituents.”
But if Democrats continue the assault on Kavanaugh, they most certainly will not be respecting Ford’s request for this to end.
If I could have two television shows and two movies on a desert island, they’d be “The Office,” (the American version) “Breaking Bad,” “The Dark Knight,” and “Die Hard.” I love sports, video games, comics, movies and television. And I guess my job, too.
Christine Blasey Ford testifies Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington. (Melina Mara / AFP / Getty Images)
A statement from the attorney representing a friend of Christine Blasey Ford’s indicated once again that she has no recollection of the event that Ford testified to in the Senate on Thursday.
Ford claimed that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and attempted to rape her at a party 36 years ago. That accusation put Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote on hold until the FBI can further investigate her claims.
Thus far, the only evidence that Ford has brought in the case is her own testimony. All of the individuals who she claimed attended the party with her and Kavanaugh deny any knowledge of the event taking place.
One of those people is Ford’s close friend Leland Keyser. Last week, Keyser said in a statement from her attorney, on penalty of a felony, that she didn’t attend such a party and didn’t even know Kavanaugh.
“Simply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford,” attorney Howard Walsh III said.
Walsh spoke out again Saturday, saying that Keyser doesn’t have any helpful information.
In a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said, “Ms. Keyser asked that I communicate to the committee her willingness to cooperate fully with the FBI’s supplemental investigation of Dr. Christine Ford’s allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh.”
Walsh went on to stipulate that “as my client as already made clear, she does not know Judge Kavanaugh and has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.”
Keyser does, however, believe Ford, she said.
“Notably Ms. Keyser does not refute Dr. Ford’s account, and she has already told the press that she believes Dr. Ford’s account,” Walsh said.
Her belief in her friend didn’t keep Keyser from conveying that “the simple and unchangeable truth is that she is unable to corroborate it because she has no recollection of the incident in question.”
Keyser’s statement came in response to the decision by the Senate, which was backed by President Donald Trump, to ask the FBI to further investigate the allegations against Kavanaugh.
The president’s stamp of approval on the controversial supplemental investigation came with some limitations.
“I’ve ordered the FBI to conduct a supplemental investigation to update Judge Kavanaugh’s file,”Trump said in a statement.
“As the Senate has requested, this update must be limited in scope and completed in less than one week.”
However, many Republicans view the way this accusation has been handled by Democrats to be little more than a stalling technique in hopes of postponing the vote until after the midterm elections.
During Thursday’s questioning, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called out his colleagues for what he called the “charade” and for victimizing both Ford and Kavanaugh.
An earlier version of this article accidentally referred to Ms. Leland Keyser as “he” and, in one instance from her lawyer’s transcribed statement, as “Mr. Keyser.” We corrected these mistakes within a few minutes of their being pointed out by a reader, but failed to issue a correction in accordance with our own Ethics and Editorial Standards. We apologize to Ms. Keyser and our readers for these errors.
Savannah Pointer is a constitutional originalist whose main goal is to keep the wool from being pulled over your eyes. She believes that the liberal agenda will always depend on Americans being uneducated and easy to manipulate. Her mission is to present the news in a straightforward yet engaging manner.
If you had the stout constitution to sit through every moment of the Kavanaugh/Ford hearings Thursday, I’m both envious and curious. The envy stems from the fact that you could watch a room of craven politicians preen for the camera and donor-email clips and not lose interest. The curiosity stems from the fact that I get paid to do it, while most of our readership does not.
If you waited until the end, however, you got to glimpse the guiding spirit of the whole affair — or what a certain anonymous Op-Ed writer might have called the “lodestar” that directed the proceedings — in a line from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
After being accused of leaking the letter that set this whole thing rolling, the California senator denied either she or her staff released it. Instead, she blamed the leak on a woman who was now utterly disposable to her — Christine Blasey Ford.
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The exchange began after Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz questioned the leaking of the letter, which had been passed on to Sen. Feinstein.
“We also know that the Democrats on this committee engaged in a profoundly unfair process,” Cruz said.
“The ranking member had these allegations on July 30th and for sixty days, that was sixty days ago, the ranking member did not refer it to the FBI for investigation, the ranking member did not refer it to the full committee for an investigation.
“This committee could have investigated those claims in a confidential way that respected Dr. Ford’s privacy,”Cruz continued.
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“Dr. Ford told this committee that the only people to whom she gave her letter, were her attorneys, the ranking member, and her member of Congress.
“And she stated that she and her attorneys did not release the letter, which means the only people who could have released the letter were either the ranking member (Sen. Feinstein) and her staff, or the Democratic member of Congress, because Dr. Ford told this committee those are the only people who had it.
“That is not a fair process,”Cruz said.
There were two options for Sen. Feinstein in this situation: a) apologize or b) deny. If she chose option b), however, there wasn’t the obligation to take path c): throw Christine Blasey Ford under an entire Greyhound station of buses.
That’s what she decided to do, however.
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“Mr. Chairman, let me be clear, I did not hide Dr. Ford’s allegations. I did not leak her story, she asked me to keep it confidential and I kept if confidential as she asked,” Feinstein said in response.
“She apparently was stalked by the press, felt that what happened, she was forced to come forward, and her greatest fear was realized,”Feinstein continued.
“She’s been harassed, she’s had death threats, and she’s had to flee her home.”
After blaming the Republicans for their investigation, which she called “a partisan practice,” she continued to talk up the possible imperilment Ford was in.
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“I was given some information by a woman who was very much afraid, who asked that it be held confidential, and I held it confidential until she decided that she would come forward,”Feinstein said.
She was then asked if her staff had leaked the letter by Sen. John Cornyn, another Texas Republican.
“I have not asked that question directly, but I do not believe — the answer is no,” Feinstein responded. “The staff, they did not.”
“Well, somebody leaked it if wasn’t you,”Cornyn said.
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“I did not, I was asked to keep it confidential, and I’m criticized for that too!” she said.
“It’s my understanding that her story was leaked before the letter became public, and she testified that she had spoken to her friends about it and it’s most likely that that’s how the story leaked, and she had been asked by press.
“But it did not leak from us,” Feinstein concluded. “I assure you of that.”
Yes, the letter leaked because this woman, who thought she was in grave jeopardy, leaked the whole thing to the press by telling her friends, who were willing to put her in that grave jeopardy by passing it on.
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It had nothing — nothing — to do with the Democrats who would have benefited most from this and would have had the motivation to pass it on.
Right.
Every single problem with this entire process can be, in some way, traced back to Dianne Feinstein. She’s the one who sat on the letter, refusing to bring it up when it should have been addressed. She’s the one whose cryptic statements helped stoke the embers of curiosity. She’s the one who would call for an FBI investigation even though the FBI added the letter to Kavanaugh’s background file and moved on. She’s the one who helped oversee the circus we witnessed Thursday.
And, once Christine Blasey Ford was finally disposable to her, she was tossed to the tigers as an encore.
The last-minute attempt to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as the next Supreme Court justice has just hit a serious snag. Facing damaging but almost completely unsubstantiated claims that he acted improperly with a girl back when he was a teenager, the conservative nominee has dug into his personal archives to defend himself.
Up until now, the vague accusations made by Christine Blasey Ford had only resulted in a “he said, she said” stalemate. Liberals insisted that Blasey Ford’s story of a bad encounter at a drunken party be believed, while conservatives have pointed out that the nearly 40-year-old claim is impossible to verify.
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Finally, Kavanaugh has presented tangible evidence that the accusation doesn’t hold up.
On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the judge has found old calendars from the period when the unproven groping allegedly took place — and they appear to support his claim that the incident didn’t happen.
“Kavanaugh has calendars from the summer of 1982 that he plans to hand over to the Senate Judiciary Committee that do not show a party consistent with the description of his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford,”explained The Times.
“The calendar pages from June, July and August 1982, which were examined by The New York Times, show that Judge Kavanaugh was out of town much of the summer at the beach or away with his parents,”the newspaper continued.
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“When he was at home, the calendars list his basketball games, movie outings, football workouts and college interviews. A few parties are mentioned but include names of friends other than those identified by Dr. Blasey.”
Here is perhaps the biggest nail in the coffin for Blasey Ford’s already-flimsy story: The calendar contains entries for parties, but none of the names included in those entries match the names Blasey Ford listed.
That any names were included in his calendar entries for parties shows Kavanaugh was remarkably thorough about recording his social schedule.
That fact is yet another point in favor of Kavanaugh and against his accuser. The woman behind the claim has admitted that she can recall almost nothing specific about the incident, including its location, time, or other people involved.
The few names brought up by Blasey Ford have refuted her story and indicated that they don’t remember a party with both her and Kavanaugh.
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“Mr. (Mike) Judge has told the Judiciary Committee that he remembered no such incident and had never seen Judge Kavanaugh behave in such a way,”explained The Times, referring to one alleged witness of the drunken party.
“The only other two people identified as being in the house at the time, but not the bedroom, have also said in recent days that they did not recall the incident. Patrick J. Smyth said he did not remember such a party or see any improper conduct by Judge Kavanaugh.”
“Leland Keyser, a former classmate of Dr. Blasey’s at Holton-Arms, said she did not know Judge Kavanugh or remember being at a party with him,”stated the newspaper.
Accusations of this type are of course serious, and conducting due diligence is part of the vetting process for anyone nominated for a powerful position. There comes a point, however, when weak and impossible to prove allegations need to be put to rest. Blasey Ford may genuinely believe that something like the incident she described did happen; she may be telling the truth about a teenage trauma affecting her for decades, too.
The problem is that there is zero evidence it was Brett Kavanaugh who did what she claims, and no way short of a time machine to prove her accusations.
By all accounts, Kavanaugh has been a responsible and thoughtful family man and legal scholar for the entirety of his adult life — and that record needs to stand far above one person’s increasingly shaky claim.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly claimed that Judge Kavanaugh’s 1982 calendar does not contain any names identified in Christine Blasey Ford’s claim against Kavanaugh. The calendar does reference Mike Judge, a friend of Kavanaugh and, according to Blasey Ford, a witness to the alleged assault. Judge’s name, however, is not mentioned in reference to any parties, while other names are — none of which have been identified by Blasey Ford. We apologize for the mistake.
Benjamin Arie has been a political junkie since the hotly contested 2000 election. Ben settled on journalism after realizing he could get paid to rant. He cut his teeth on car accidents and house fires as a small-town reporter in Michigan before becoming a full-time political writer.
As the Donald Trump-Russia collusion narrative designed to smear and stymie the Trump presidency continues to unravel, some members of the previous administration have become even more outspoken and shrill in their condemnations of how things are being run than they already were.
The latest to do so publicly is former Obama administration Attorney General Eric Holder, who took to Twitter to express his grave concern over Trump’s demand that the Department of Justice look into whether former President Barack Obama’s FBI/DOJ investigated his 2016 campaign for “political purposes.”
However, Holder urged the DOJ to “simply say no” to what he viewed as a demand from Trump that was outside “DOJ norms.”
Trump had tweeted Sunday, “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes – and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!”
On Monday, Trump hosted a meeting at the White House with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray, according to The Hill. The meeting’s goal was to no doubt discuss the specifics of the order from the president.
Trump’s tweeted order on Sunday and subsequent White House meeting led to Holder’s Monday evening tweet.
“More DOJ norms being eroded. Trump-a SUBJECT of the investigation-wants access to material related to the inquiry,” the former attorney general tweeted.
“His Congressional supporters want evidence connected to an ongoing investigation. Time for DOJ/FBI to simply say no-protect the institutions and time tested norms,”Holder added.
Holder, who served as head of the DOJ from 2009-2015, has been an especially vocal critic of Trump since the 2016 campaign season, and has even intimated that he is considering mounting a presidential challenge against Trump in 2020.
This most recent criticism of Trump came on the heels of revelations via FBI leaks that the bureau had utilized at least one “informant” during the election season to “spy” on the Trump campaign and dig up dirt on alleged connections to and collusion with Russia.
Unfortunately for Holder and his urging of the DOJ to disobey an order from the president, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders announced following the Monday meeting that the DOJ had asked Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s office to “expand its current investigation to include any irregularities with the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s or the Department of Justice’s tactics concerning the Trump Campaign.”
Furthermore, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly was set to arrange a meeting involving top law enforcement officials and top members of Congress to “review” certain “highly classified materials”related to the FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign that have been sought by lawmakers, Sanders said.
The question that must be asked, given the shrill tweet by Holder and others in recent days and weeks, is that if the actions of the DOJ and FBI under Obama were entirely above board and beyond reproach, as has been insisted, why are they protesting any inquiry into those actions so much? Surely they have nothing to hide, right?
To paraphrase a line from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that seems particularly relevant at this point, the former attorney general doth protest too much, methinks.
Every place you look in Robert Mueller’s investigation, the same names keep popping up: FBI agent Peter Strzok and sleazy, foreign private eye — or “British intelligence agent” — Christopher Steele.
So it’s rather important that they both are Trump-hating fanatics, and one was being paid by Trump’s political opponent in a presidential campaign.
Steele is the author of the preposterous dossier that sparked the special counsel investigation, and Strzok is the FBI agent involved at every crucial turn of both the Trump and Hillary investigations.
As we found out from the House Intelligence memo, Steele told Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr that he “was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate about him not being president.” (Ohr’s wife worked for Fusion GPS, and, like Steele, was being paid by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.)
In the hands of Trump-obsessive Peter Strzok — he of the estrogen-dripping texts to his Trump-hating FBI lawyer mistress — the dossier was used to obtain a warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act against Trump’s alleged “foreign policy adviser,”Carter Page. The FISA warrant against Page constitutes the last crumbling piece of the “Russia collusion” story.
Strzok was the person who instigated the Russia investigation against Trump back in July 2016. He was the lead agent on the investigation into whether Hillary, as secretary of state, sent classified information on her private email account. (Conclusion: She had — but it wasn’t any of the FBI’s business!) He volunteered for the Mueller investigation and remained there, right up until his Trump-hating texts were discovered by the inspector general of the FBI. (He was also, one surmises, the authority for many of the media’s lurid, anonymously sourced claims about how the investigation was proceeding.)
Most strangely, Strzok was the FBI agent who asked Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, about his phone call with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
There was nothing wrong with Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak, but Flynn later pleaded guilty to lying to an FBI agent about it, based on a secretly recorded intercept of the phone call. The question remains: Why was any FBI agent even asking about a perfectly legitimate conversation? No one seems to know. But we do know the name of the FBI agent who asked: Peter Strzok.
Aside from Strzok’s girl-power text to his mistress upon Hillary becoming the first female presidential nominee — “About damn time!” — his most embarrassing message to her was about the Russia investigation:
“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office (FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe) — that there’s no way (Trump) gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 …”
The media have tied themselves in knots trying to explain this text as meaning anything other than its obvious, natural meaning. To wit: “Although the worst is unlikely (Trump wins/you die before age 40), you still prepare by taking out ‘insurance’ (we take Trump down with the Russia investigation/your family gets a payout).”
I keep looking for a plausible alternative interpretation, but they’re all absurd; e.g., The Washington Post points out that even with an insurance policy, YOU STILL DIE! (Yes, and even with the Russian investigation, TRUMP IS STILL PRESIDENT.) Everyone except American journalists understands that Strzok’s “insurance” was their plan to tie Trump up with an endless investigation. Which, coincidentally, is exactly what they’ve done.
Contrary to every single person talking on MSNBC, the issue is not whether FBI agents are allowed to have political opinions. In a probe of the president, FBI agents shouldn’t be dying to take him down for political reasons.
You want drug enforcement agents to be hungry to shut down drug cartels. You want organized crime prosecutors to be hungry to dismantle the mob. You want your maid to be hungry to clean your house. But the staff on a special counsel’s open-ended investigation of the president aren’t supposed to be hungry. They’re supposed to be fair.
This is an investigation with no evidence of a crime, apart from politically motivated, anti-Trump investigators relying on a Hillary-funded dossier.
Also contrary to every single person talking on MSNBC, Steele’s dossier is not like a neighbor who hates you telling the police you’re cooking meth in your basement. The police still have to investigate, don’t they?
First of all, if after 18 months of police work, the only evidence that you’re cooking meth in your basement is STILL your neighbor’s bald accusation, reasonable people will conclude that your neighbor is a liar. That’s what the Steele dossier is. It was the only evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia 18 months ago, and it’s the only evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia today.
Moreover, it’s not just the informant who hates the target. The investigators do, too. This is more like a police officer calling the police on his wife, sending himself on the call, shooting her, then writing up the police report concluding it was a justified shooting.
When your entire investigation turns on a handful of people with corrupt motives, maybe it’s time to call off the investigation.
As special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian collusion of the 2016 election continues on, President Donald Trump has one big question on his mind.
“Whatever happened to Podesta?” “They closed their firm, they left in disgrace, the whole thing, and now you never heard of anything,” the president said during a wide-ranging New York Times interview.
Trump was referring to Tony Podesta, the founder of The Podesta Group and brother of former Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Like members of Trump’s presidential campaign, Podesta has also found himself at the center of Mueller’s growing FBI inquiry.
During The Times interview, the president said he believed Muller would treat him fairly, but he also expressed frustration that Podesta has seemingly escaped scrutiny since stepping down from the firm he founded in October.
The long-time Democrat is under investigation for activities similar to those of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Manafort, having a long history of lobbying for foreign entities, led a public relations campaign for a nonprofit called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine. Podesta Group also took part in promoting Ukraine in the United States, being one of several firms that were paid to do public relations work, according to Politico.
His group filed paperwork with the Justice Department indicating that it had worked on behalf of the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, benefiting the same Ukrainian political party that Manafort advised. In late October, Manafort was indicted on an array of charges that included money laundering, failing to disclose overseas bank accounts, operating as an agent of the Ukrainian government and making false statements to federal authorities.
Trump severed ties with Manafort during the election as it became apparent law enforcement was looking into him. The president has since tried to put distance between himself and the beleaguered lobbyist.
“Paul only worked for me for a few months,” he explained.
“Paul worked for Ronald Reagan. His firm worked for John McCain, worked for Bob Dole, worked for many Republicans for far longer than he worked for me. And you’re talking about what Paul was many years ago before I ever heard of him. He worked for me for — what was it, three and a half months?”
Podesta, for his part, has not endured much public scrutiny since stepping down from his firm a couple months ago and it’s not exactly known what action federal authorities will take regarding his investigation. Along with believing that more attention should be placed on Podesta’s past lobbying activities, the Republican president spoke at length about the FBI investigation that has haunted his first year in the White House.
Pushing back against their allegations, the president said that Democrats concocted claims of Russian collusion “as a hoax, as a ruse, as an excuse for losing an election.” Trump also asserted that “everybody knows”his 2016 campaign staff did not collude with any Russian officials and even reversed the accusations by suggesting Democrats were the ones who worked with Russians during the presidential election.
Around seven months have passed since Muller was appointed to lead an investigation, but no charges have yet been brought forward against the president.
“There’s been no collusion. But I think he’s going to be fair,” Trump said of Mueller.
This evening Circa has a HUGE breaking story that could have a huge impact on the ongoing work of several investigations.
It seems that the Justice Department may be zeroing in on FBI General Counsel James Baker for allegedly leaking classified national security information to the media.
Multiple government officials have confirmed the story with Circa, though all have done so on the condition of anonymity.
Baker is a confidante and close friend of the recently fired FBI Director James Comey, and is thought to have been quietly advising Comey on his dealings with President Trump.
FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty said the bureau would not comment on Baker and would not confirm or deny any investigation.
This comes as Department of Justice Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he would soon be making an announcement regarding the progress of leak investigations.
A DOJ official declined to comment on Circa’s inquiry into Baker but did say, the planned announcement by Sessions is part of the overall “stepped up efforts on leak investigations.”
Three sources, with knowledge of the investigation, told Circa that Baker is the top suspect in an ongoing leak investigation, but Circa has not been able to confirm the details of what national security information or material was allegedly leaked.
A federal law enforcement official with knowledge of ongoing internal investigations in the bureau told Circa, “the bureau is scouring for leakers and there’s been a lot of investigations.”
The revelation comes as the Trump administration has ramped up efforts to contain leaks both within the White House and within its own national security apparatus.
Baker was named to his current job by his buddy Comey, but he has had a long and distinguished career working with our intelligence agencies so it’s sad to see his career likely coming to such an ignominious end.
(Though it’s hard to feel bad for anyone who was helping Comey undermine President Trump.)
Journalist Sara Carter explained what it all means on Fox News Thursday evening:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Onan Coca
Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Romulus Marketing. He’s also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children. You can find his writing all over the web.
Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly claimed Wednesday evening that, despite all the hoopla by the media over former FBI Director James Comey’s then-upcoming testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee regarding his conversations with President Donald Trump, the president has done nothing wrong.
“A sitting President has absolute authority to ask about any investigation as long as the Prez does not interfere in fact gathering process,”he wrote in a tweet.
In Comey’s testimony the next morning, the former director admitted that in February the president allegedly asked him to drop the bureau’s investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who ostensibly resigned earlier that month after prior conversations between him and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak became public.
Moreover, even if Trump had actually ordered Comey to stop the investigation, that order would itself not have been wrong either, according to law scholar Alan Dershowitz.
“(O)ur history shows that many presidents — from Adams to Jefferson, to Lincoln, to Roosevelt, to Kennedy, to Bush 1, and to Obama — have directed the Justice Department with regard to ongoing investigations,”he wrote Thursday in an op-ed for Fox News. “The history is clear, the precedents are clear, the constitutional structure is clear, and common sense is clear.”
But did Trump really “order” Comey to halt the investigation?
The answer to this question remains murky, though what former Director Comey himself wrote in his farewell letter is not: “I have long believed that a President can fire an FBI Director for any reason, or for no reason at all.”
OK, then why is Comey still complaining? And why are the “hysterical” media, as O’Reilly referred to them, acting as the former director’s testimony was somehow earth-shattering? Is it because they’re idiots or they’re just full of it? Knowing them, it’s probably both.
The Washington Post may very well have led the American public seriously astray via its recent attacks on President Donald Trump. The Post claimed that FBI Director James Comey wrote a memo in which he said that Trump had asked him to drop the investigation on former administration member Michael Flynn, despite a clear claim to the contrary by Comey’s successor, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe.
What’s more frustrating than that is the fact that The Post claimed anonymous sources backed up its statements, but provided no real substance.
Just look for a second at this verbiage. This is an actual, serious line from The Washington Post that they just expect the good people of America to believe:
“‘I hope you can let this go,’ Trump said, according to the Comey notes, which were described by the associates. Comey’s written account of the meeting is two pages long and highly detailed, the associates said.”
And although Comey has not come out and said specifically that Trump never asked him to stop investing Flynn, he certainly seemed to imply it in May 3 testimony he gave the Senate Judiciary Committee.
When asked whether senior DOJ officials could ask the FBI to drop an investigation, Comey said flat-out, “It’s not happened in my experience,”according to a transcript, provided by, once again, The Washington Post.
Although that’s not a denial of Trump himself having asked Comey to drop the investigation, there does seem to be that implication at the very least. You’d think if Trump had said something, Comey would also have said something.
In fact, The Post’s statement doesn’t mean much at all when you consider the actual on-the-record-in-front-of-witnesses claimsmade by acting FBI director Andrew McCabe that fly right in the face of these unsubstantiated accusations.
When Sen. Marco Rubio asked McCabe before the Senate Intelligence Committee whether or not the firing of former FBI Director James Comey “in any way impeded, interrupted, stopped or negatively impacted any of the work, any investigation, or any ongoing projects at the Federal Bureau of Investigation,”McCabe’s response was even more definitive than the question given to him dictated.
“As you know, senator,”McCabe said, “the work of the men and women of the FBI continues despite any changes in circumstance, any decisions, so there has been no effort to impede our investigation to date.”
Huh. No effort at all to impede our investigation to date. Interesting.
The Washington Post’s editors tried to cover themselves by saying, “It’s unclear from the questioning if McCabe was talking solely about the consequences of Comey’s abrupt firing, or referring to a specific investigation on Trump’s associates for possible connections to Russian officials.”
Yeah, right. That’s not the only thing unclear here.
Washington, D.C. has reversed its thinking on the seriousness of federal government leaks with President Donald Trump in the White House. Leaks of classified federal information are now treated as not a big deal — so long as they are damaging to Trump. Damaging leaks of classified information seem to be the preferred way to pry information from Trump, a Republican, no matter the slippery slope that federal workers head down when they unleash the documents.
A transcript of the president’s call to a foreign leader? No problem. Unmasking the name of an American citizen as he spoke to the Russian ambassador? That sounds fine to many. So long as it zings Trump.
In the previous decade, Democrats demanded prosecution of leakers of classified information, and with gusto.
In fact, the last time the Republicans held the White House, the Democrats and media built a witch hunt around a journalist’s news column. The goal was to embarrass the administration of President George W. Bush.
The Plame Affair
On July 14, 2003, columnist Robert Novak revealed that an Iraq War critic, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, had traveled to Africa in February 2002 to look into claims Iraq was buying yellowcake uranium from Niger.
It was a complicated tale of the buildup to the war, but Novak got into trouble for this sentence: “Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me that Wilson’s wife suggested sending him to Niger to investigate.”
David Corn, a left-wing journalist now with Mother Jones, insisted the law had been broken in the leak to Novak. The political drumbeat began, the CIA asked for action, and in September 2003, President Bush and his attorney general named a prosecutor. The investigation took two long years. As the indictment came, liberals could barely contain their glee. Some hoped for Bush’s Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to be “frog-marched” to court.
And Lawrence O’Donnell, now with MSNBC, made an infamous whiff of a prediction: “[A]t least three high-level Bush Administration personnel indicted and possibly one or more very high level unindicted co-conspirators.”
But no one was indicted for the leak itself. Scooter Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted for misleading federal investigators in 2007. Perhaps realizing the political nature of the case, President Bush commuted Libby’s sentence.
New Standards in 2017: Fast-forward to February 2017.
Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, resigned on Feb. 13 because it was disclosed in leaks that he spoke with the Russian ambassador in late December. Flynn had told Vice President Mike Pence that he did not mention sanctions on Russia. The leaks were detailed enough to prove that wrong. The amount of effort that went into the leak was prodigious, according to a Republican staffer on Capitol Hill who works in intelligence.
The leaker would have not only have to have access to the transcripts of the Russian ambassador, but power to “unmask” Flynn, who would have been initially protected by U.S. law.
The seriousness of the leaks involving Flynn helped build tremendous disappointment on Monday, when FBI Director James Comey, acting oddly as usual, said he could not even confirm an investigation into the leaks.
A former intelligence operative told LifeZette that the leaks of Flynn’s name show possible political intent, from the start of the intel gathering all the way through. The former intel operative says he wonders who at the FBI or the National Security Agency received emails or calls from the National Security Council or the White House about the Flynn meeting. The former intel operative says normally, any intelligence professional, especially a manager, would recognize that the collection of Flynn’s data, even in the incidental fashion as they followed the Russian ambassador, would be so laced with political danger to their agency that they would “run away” from it. Or they would notify the relevant oversight committees at Congress, to protect everyone concerned.
Instead, the information got leaked to the media, to damage Flynn.
What if the shoe had been on the other foot?
What if, the former intel operative wondered, the Bush administration’s National Security Council had received incidental collection on the Obama campaign in late 2008, and not informed the congressional oversight committees?
There would be hell to pay, he said.
So what is the media doing in 2017? They are asking for more leaks of classified documents. Some newspapers have even set up anonymous online “dropboxes.” And the Democrats? They are nowhere to be seen on the issue.
In a massive embarrassment to Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, a delegate to the Democrat National Convention announced on the air that he would not be voting for Hillary come the fall because of her dishonesty.
Speaking with ABC reporter Jonathan Karl in Philadelphia, where the convention was being held, he dropped the bombshell: “As far as president, I will not be voting for Hillary Clinton.”
As you can imagine, Karl was shocked.
“You are a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and you are not going to be voting for Hillary Clinton. Why?”he asked.
And as one might expect, the delegate mentioned her gross mishandling of her private email server scandal as evidence of her dishonesty and impetus for voting against her.
“Well, it’s really just as simple as I feel as if she hasn’t been honest with us, and the fact of the matter is, she said for over a year there (was) no classified information sent or received on her private email server, and the FBI said that’s not true,”he said.
“She wouldn’t even call it an investigation,”he added. “She called it a security review. If she’s not even going to be honest about the nature of that investigation, what else can we expect? I have no love for (GOP nominee Donald) Trump, but I also have no love for Hillary.”
It’s nice to see some delegates with a sound head still on their shoulders, even at the Democrat convention.
Should he be able to withstand the pressure to vote for Hillary Clinton, and if GOP nominee Donald Trump isn’t an option, he will almost certainly fall to one of the two significant party candidates — Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.
Or, he might just stay home. We’re OK with any of those options.
Three committees in the House of Representatives announced Friday that they were launching concurrent investigations into allegations that President Barack Obama deliberately manipulated intelligence reports from Syria and Iraq, allowing the Islamic State group to thrive.
According to the Washington Examiner, Republican Reps. Ken Calvert of California, Mike Pompeo of Kansas and Brad Wenstrup of Ohio will lead the investigations for the Armed Services Committee, Intelligence Committee and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, respectively.
“In addition to looking into the specific allegations, the Joint Task Force will examine whether these allegations reflect systemic problems across the intelligence enterprise in CENTCOM or any other pertinent intelligence organizations,”read a joint statement from Armed Services Committee Chairman Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Rodney Freylinghuysen, R-N.J.
The investigations by the House committees joined an investigation by the Pentagon’s inspector general’s office in relation to the Obama administration’s alleged manipulation of Islamic State group intelligence at U.S. Central Command.
A September report said that 50 intelligence officials at CENTCOM had signed a letter claiming intelligence on the Islamic State group had been doctored. The report claimed that the Obama administration would deliberately punish any intelligence official who gave accurate assessments of terror group strength and didn’t doctor the information to make it look like the United States was winning the battle against them.
Even Democrats have gotten on the president and the administration about the intelligence doctoring, including one of the ranking Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jackie Speier of California.
“More recently the intelligence community, I think, has provided much more accurate assessments. But CENTCOM, which is the area that is responsible for the Middle East, has, for whatever reasons, we don’t know yet why, has dumbed down the intelligence, has sweetened it, has made it seem like we are being more successful there than we are,”Speier said.
“I’m deeply troubled by what I believe is doctoring that has taken place and has created an impression that we are doing better there than we actually are.”
Rep. Speier may claim “we don’t know yet why”intelligence reports were doctored, but we’re pretty sure we understand why.
And pretty soon, these congressional investigations will reveal officially put the “why” out there for the world to see.
Do you think this deriliction of duty by Obama has helped the Islamic State group to thrive?
Democratic presidential candidate HillaryClinton listens to a question at town hall meeting in New Hampshire. | AP Photo
Even as Hillary Clinton tries to put questions about her private email server behind her, the FBI has stepped up inquiries into the security of the former secretary of state’s home-made email system and how aides communicated over email, POLITICO has learned.
The FBI’s recent moves suggest that its inquiry could have evolved from the preliminary fact-finding stage that the agency launches when it receives a credible referral, according to former FBI and Justice Department officials interviewed by POLITICO.
“This sounds to me like it’s more than a preliminary inquiry; it sounds like a full-blown investigation,” said Tom Fuentes, former assistant director of the FBI. “When you have this amount of resources going into it …. I think it’s at the investigative level.”
The FBI declined to respond to questions about the scope of its ongoing work.
But POLITICO learned that around early October, the FBI requested documents from a company involved in the server arrangement after Clinton left State. It also interviewed a former high-ranking policy official at State about the contents of top Clinton aides’ emails.
The official, who spoke to POLITICO on condition of anonymity, said the questions explored whether anyone at State was concerned about classified information being put at risk by communicating via email. The source did not know of any such concerns.
Confirmation of the interview and document requests is the first public indication that the agency is moving ahead with its inquiry – and possibly expanding it.
The former State official interviewed by the FBI, for example, had little to do with the Clinton server set-up or any approval process allowing her to use personal email for work — suggesting the FBI’s initial inquiry about the actual physical security of Clinton’s home-made server now also includes looking at the content of messages shared by staff.
Former FBI and Justice officials familiar with the investigative procedures on such matters said the agency must determine two main things: whether the use of an outside email system posed any risks to national security secrets and, if so, whether anyone was responsible for exposing classified information.
FBI Director James Comey acknowledged in October that his agency was probing the server matter generally and believed it had the resources to look into the issues, though he didn’t give specifics.
Over the summer, the Department of Justice said it received a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General about potentially exposed classified information on Clinton’s home-made email server. The referral, Justice said at the time, was not criminal in nature but focused on the counterintelligence law governing national security secrets.
The matter at the time was considered a “preliminary” inquiry.
Clinton’s campaign and lawyers have said they are cooperating, turning over her server and a thumb drive backup of her messages to the FBI. They’ve also said they’re encouraging everyone who worked on the server issue to do the same. Platte River Networks, the Denver-based company that housed her server since she left State in 2013, for example, has said it’s cooperating; so has Datto, another tech company that provided a cloud backup of Clinton’s messages.
But exactly who they’re talking to at the staff level has been unclear. For example: Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s former chief of staff at State and lawyer who helped determine which of her emails were personal and work related, wouldn’t say in a recent Washington Post interview whether she had been contacted due to confidentiality surrounding the FBI’s work.
The FBI ultimately decides whether to take a preliminary inquiry to a full-fledged investigation — and if it does so, it is under no obligation to say so publicly. The classification level of any compromised information “may be a factor in determining whether an FBI investigation is warranted,” reads an overview of FBI procedures.
In its review of Clinton’s emails, the State Department has classified more than 400 messages so far — materials that would not therefore be allowed on a homemade email system, although Clinton has said that none of them were marked classified at the time she or her staff received or sent them.
POLITICO reported on Friday that some of the original messages that triggered the referral — a couple messages the ICIG said were “top secret,” the most sensitive national security material — were no longer considered that protected. Sources told POLITICO this week that as of a month ago, the Justice Department had not determined how to proceed with Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s top IT expert who oversaw her server but took the Fifth and refused to answer questions when subpoenaed by Congress earlier this year.
Republican lawmakers have weighed an immunity agreement for Pagliano, which would bar him from prosecution and allow him to talk about what he knew of the server: who approved it, why and the security surrounding the system.
His lawyer, reached Thursday, would not confirm whether he’s even been contacted by the FBI.
The agency has asked for documents from Tania Neild, the New York-based technology broker for millionaires, who put the Clintons in touch with Platte River Networks.
Neild confirmed the FBI request in an interview with POLITICO, saying the agency asked her to appear with written documents relating to the advice she gave to her client about negotiating with Platte River. Her company, InfoGrate, acts as a middle man between high-worth individuals and companies that oversee their personal technologies, such as emails.
Neild operates under a confidentiality agreement with all her clients. She said the nondisclosure arrangement precluded her from cooperating with the Senate Homeland Security Committee, which is also investigating the server issue and reached out to her for an interview. But the FBI notice, she said, trumped her confidentiality agreement.
Her lawyer would not confirm any contact they may or may not have had with the Department of Justice or the FBI.
“What we did receive were inquiries from [the Senate Homeland Committee] that are looking into various things,” said Ron Safer, of Chicago’s Schiff Hardin. “And whether we have had communications with anybody else, I really can’t say at this point.”
Due to secrecy surrounding any FBI investigation, it is impossible to know exactly where the FBI stands. And since the issue involves the 2016 Democratic front-runner, the work is even more sensitive.
Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division, said Justice is likely worried about issuing formal legal notices “because they know it will get out, and then you’re talking about a grand jury investigation.” But he said it’s “not uncommon” for companies to require subpoenas, court orders or other legal notices to cooperate to save their corporate reputation, which could otherwise be jeopardized for sharing personal information.
“I am sure there is hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth across the street at the Hoover Building because you’re going to have people saying ‘I don’t want to produce X documents. Give me a piece of paper that covers me.’ And that’s where push is going to come to shove,” Hosko said.
The FBI has seized four State Department computer servers as part of its probe into how classified information was compromised on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email system, according to people familiar with the investigation.
The four servers, which were located at the State Department’s headquarters building, were seized by the FBI several weeks ago. They are being checked by technical forensic analysts charged with determining how Top Secret material was sent to Clinton’s private email by State Department aides during her tenure as secretary from 2009 to 2013, said two people familiar with the probe. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing investigation.
State Department spokesman John Kirby referred questions about the computer servers to the FBI. An FBI spokeswoman, Carol Cratty, declined to comment. No other details about the servers, including whether they are part of the department’s classified system, or used for unclassified information networks, could be learned. A spokesman for the Clinton campaign did not respond to an email request for comment.
Clinton has offered varying explanations for her use of a private email server, initially claiming she had done nothing wrong. Then, under pressure from critics, she said she was sorry people were confused by the practice, later admitting in early September that her use of a private email system had been a mistake.
The State Department uses two separate networks, one for classified information and one for unclassified information. The two networks are kept separate for security reasons. Most classified networks are equipped with audit systems that allow security managers to check who has accessed intelligence or foreign policy secrets.
The FBI is trying to determine the origin of the highly classified information that was found in Clinton emails. However, the task is said to be complicated because those with authority to create classified information have broad authority to label information in one of three categories: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret.
The FBI is primarily concerned with trying to determine how Top Secret information made its way on to the private server.
Chris Farrell, an investigator with the public interest legal group Judicial Watch, said the State Department has been reluctant to describe the nature of its computer networks as some of the 16 Freedom of Information Act lawsuits the group has filed make their way through the courts.
Farrell said in an interview that the department also has been unwilling to say whether the private email system, used by Clinton and close aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, should be considered an official State Department network covered by FOIA laws.
Farrell said the seizure of the four State Department servers is likely part of the forensic investigation underway by the FBI into hardware used by Clinton and her aides to send email to the private server.
“In the midst of what I believe to be a forensic examination of the hardware that [Clinton lawyer David] Kendall surrendered on behalf of Mrs. Clinton, any serious national security investigation would seek to track all emails inbound and outbound,”Farrell said. “If they are doing that tracking of email since she was secretary of state, then they would be looking at any email that could have crossed into a State server.”
The servers were part of the State Department bureau of information resource management. The bureau helps the department “to successfully carry out its foreign policy mission by applying modern IT tools, approaches, systems, and information products.”
In addition to improving efforts of “transparent, interconnected diplomacy,”the bureau is “focused on enhancing security for the department’s computer and communications systems.”
The FBI probe of State Department servers is the latest disclosure on the criminal investigation into the private Clinton email server that has embroiled the leading Democratic presidential candidate for several months. The FBI took possession of Clinton’s private email server last summer after classified information was found in some of the more than 30,000 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department. The investigation began after I. Charles McCullough, the intelligence community inspector general, reported to Congress Aug. 11 that Clinton’s private emails included some highly classified information labeled “Top Secret//SI/TK//Noforn.”Information classified at that level is deemed by the government to be very sensitive, requiring strong security protections because its compromise would cause grave damage to U.S. national security.
The politics surrounding the probe prompted FBI Director James Comey to tell reporters last week that the bureau will not be influenced by politics. “One of the main reasons I have a 10-year term is to make sure that this organization stays outside of politics, and if you know my folks, you know that they don’t give a whit about politics,”Comey said, adding that the FBI has devoted sufficient resources and personnel so that the Clinton email probe can be completed in a timely way. Those remarks were the first official confirmation of the investigation.
The State Department contacted Clinton’s lawyer, David E. Kendall, seeking additional emails that were not part of the more than 30,000 emails provided to the department earlier, the Washington Times reported on Tuesday.
The private email server was discovered by the legal public interest group Judicial Watch in late 2014 after the State Department informed the group that it had discovered a new tranche of records. Judicial Watch currently has at least 16 lawsuits related to State Department and other government records.nThe email server material then became the focus of House investigators looking into Clinton’s handling of the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi in 2012.
The House investigation of the Benghazi attack was attacked by Clinton this week after Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), the frontrunner to be the next House speaker, said the Benghazi probe was part of a political effort to diminish Clinton’s presidential prospects. Clinton seized on the comments in a New Hampshire town hall meeting this week.
Asked if she would have investigated a member of a Republican administration amid charges of improperly using a personal email account and server, Clinton said, “I would never have done that.”
“Look at the situation they chose to exploit to go after me for political reasons, the death of four Americans in Benghazi,” she continued.
In a sign of increasing worries about the probe at the Clinton campaign, the New York Post reported that an unidentified legal aide to Clinton has advised her to hire a criminal defense lawyer.
The number of communications regarded as classified is about 400, according to the latest State Department release of emails. Three of the new emails released last month were marked secret, including emails relating to Iranian nuclear talks. Security analysts have voiced concerns that foreign hackers may have breached the private email server.
One theory is that Clinton aides who were cleared for access to national security secrets first read classified reports on State Department information system and then “gisted” the material into private emails for Clinton. Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told the New York Times that none of the candidate’s aides had mishandled classified information. “She and her team took the handling of classified information very seriously, and at home and abroad she communicated with others via secure phone, cable, and in meetings in secure settings,”Merrill said.
The State Department has confirmed to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) in a related development that Clinton currently holds a security clearance for Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information, the highest-level security clearance. The department said Clinton’s clearance was “revalidated” after she left office in 2013 and was done so as part of a standard practice allowing former high-ranking officials to be granted access to secrets.
Critics in Congress have called for Clinton’s clearance to be revoked based on the compromises involved in her use of the private email system.
MANCHESTER, N.H. – New Jersey Governor Chris Christie indicates that he was appalled by the investigative project surrounding Planned Parenthood’s trafficking of body parts of unborn children, suggesting that a criminal investigation was certainly possible as a result of the video tapes that have been released so far. When asked about whether or not Planned Parenthood should be criminally prosecuted as a result of the investigation, Christie admitted as a former federal prosecutor that it was “certainly worthy of inquiry.”
“If I were a U.S. Attorney, would that be something worthy of inquiry? Sure,”he said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News in New Hampshire. “And then you see where the facts lead.”
He said that he didn’t know all the facts about the pro-abortion corporations’ practices.
Christie said that he had personally watched the first two video tapes released by the Center for Medical Progress, but admitted that he hadn’t yet seen the third video, which raised even more questions about the ethics of the pro-abortion corporation. He said that pro-life activists were right to be morally outraged by the material revealed in the videos.
“This is an awfully serious issue, they’re absolutely right,”he said. “The American people should be sickened by what’s being talked about on there, the harvesting of body parts, I just think it’s sickening. That’s a life.”
Christie has vetoed funds for Planned Parenthood six differrent times in six years in New Jersey, and vowed to do the same if elected president. “I just don’t think that the organization has any business getting federal money,” calling that decision an “easy call as president.”
Democrats, he pointed out, appeared afraid to discuss the tapes, because they couldn’t defend the activity that was exposed by the investigation.
“There’s no defense for it,” he said. “They don’t want to attack an organization that supports them so vehemently.”
The FBI will investigate a report that a projectile may have hit an Amtrak train moments before it derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight people, the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. FBI forensic experts are going to examine damage to the train’s windshield after the train’s crew reported something may have hit it before the crash, the paper said. National Transportation Safety Board member Robert Sumwalt said the FBI was brought in after investigators interviewed three of the train’s crew members, including engineer Brandon Bostian. Sumwalt said Bostian was “extremely cooperative but didn’t remember anything after passing the North Philadelphia station.
The derailment Tuesday killed eight people and injured more than 200 people. The train jumped the tracks as it approached a sharp curve at 106 mph, more than twice the speed limit. Without Bostian’s cooperation investigators face a tough task trying to determine why the train accelerated from more than 70 miles per hour to 106 mph over 65 seconds, the Journal said.
Sumwalt said a conductor aboard the train reported hearing a conversation in which the engineer of a nearby local regional train told her engineer that his engine had been hit by an object or shot at and she thought she heard her engineer say the same thing may have happened to him. The conductor said that right after that conversation she felt rumbling, followed by the train car turning over on its side.
Sumwalt said his team has “seen damage to the left hand lower portion of the Amtrak windshield” and has asked the FBI to look at it.
Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority spokeswoman Jerri Williams told the Philadelphia Inquirer at the time of the accident that a Trenton, N.J.-bound commuter train had been struck by an “unknown projectile” around 9:10 p.m. Tuesday, breaking the engineer’s window. The Amtrak train derailed about 9:30 p.m. three miles away.
SEPTA does not yet know what caused the damage to its train that night, Williams said. SEPTA trains traveling through the area — including one of the poorest and most violent parts of the city — have had projectiles thrown at them in the past, whether by vandals or teenagers, she said. It was unusual that the SEPTA train was forced to stop on Tuesday night.
Sumwalt said Bostian told investigators he last remembered ringing the train’s bell while passing through the North Philadelphia station Tuesday night. “He has no recollection of anything past that,”Sumwalt said. Bostian’s lawyer has said his client suffered a concussion in the wreck. He said Bostian had not been using his cell phone and had not been drinking or using drugs.
As many as 30,000 lost emails from Lois Lerner — the ex-IRS official at the center of the agency’s targeting scandal — have been recovered by federal investigators.
The IRS has already turned over thousands of Lerner emails to congressional investigators but has said the remainder are gone forever because Lerner’s hard-drive crashed in 2011. And in June, agency Commissioner John Koskinen told Congress that back-up tapes containing the missing emails have been destroyed.
“The IRS has continually dragged its feet, changed its story, and been less than forthcoming with information related to its egregious violation of Americans’ First Amendment rights,”said Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has spearheaded congressional probes on the issue.
“These e-mails are long overdue, and underscore again why we need a special prosecutor to conduct an unhindered investigation. Hopefully these e-mails will help us get to the truth,” he continued.
Lerner led the IRS division that targeted Tea Party and other conservative groups for excessive scrutiny during the 2012 presidential election cycle when they applied for tax-exempt status.
Lerner in March refused to testify before the GOP-led House investigative committee, saying she was protected under the Fifth Amendment, and has since retired.
Some of the recovered emails might be duplicates. And it could take weeks to learn their content because they are encoded, said Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Republicans on the Oversight committee.
In addition, the IRS would also have to delete information about taxpayers that is considered private before it can be released to the committee, which is headed by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif.
The federal investigators are from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, which audits the IRS. A spokeswoman for the inspector general, Karen Kraushaar, declined to comment, saying the investigation was continuing.
The investigators ignited a political firestorm in May 2013 with the initial report about the exceptionally close scrutiny.
The IRS said Saturday that it remains “committed to fully cooperating with all of the pending investigations.”
The agency also said that it learned after the June report that the TIGTA had began an investigation of the hard-drive crash and a search for additional emails.
Senate Finance Committee aides said the investigators will assess if the newly recovered data can be made readable before it can be turned over to the committee.
They said their committee, which has been conducting a bipartisan investigation of the IRS’s treatment of groups, including liberal ones, expects to complete its work early next year.
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American Family Association
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Three committees in the House of Representatives announced Friday that they were launching concurrent investigations into allegations that President Barack Obama 
Even as Hillary Clinton tries to put questions about her private email server behind her, the FBI has stepped up inquiries into the security of the former secretary of state’s home-made email system and how aides communicated over email, POLITICO has learned.
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