EXCLUSIVE: STATE DEPARTMENT WAITED TWO WEEKS TO BARELY COOPERATE WITH HILLARY EMAIL INVESTIGATION

The State Department waited almost two weeks to barely comply with a judge’s order that it cooperate with the FBI in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email use.

In a September 2 letter obtained by Breitbart News, State Department legal adviser Mary McLeod wrote to FBI general counsel James Baker asking FBI investigators to hand over any information that might be relevant to the nonprofit group Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the State Department. McLeod only asked for information that is not already in the State Department’s possession.

Judge Emmett Sullivan ordered the State Department to cooperate two weeks ago. McLeod’s one-page letter, signed a full thirteen days after Sullivan’s order, fulfills the absolute minimum level of cooperation mandated by Sullivan’s order. The State Department did not volunteer to help FBI investigators, but merely to send over any new documents before September 14, when the State Department’s status report about its cooperation in the case is due to Sullivan.

Judicial Watch is not impressed.

“It is jaw-dropping that the Obama State Department would wait 13 days to comply with an urgent August 20 federal court order requiring the State Department to coordinate with the Justice Department and FBI about making sure that documents from the seized Clinton email records are searched and produced in our FOIA litigation,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement provided to Breitbart News.

“The bare-bones September 2 letter itself shows that the Obama administration has zero interest in quickly recovering, searching and producing records it seized from Mrs. Clinton. The Obama administration continues to protect Hillary Clinton by cover-up, delay, and inaction.

Via: Breitbart

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Hillary May Just Be Dumb

Hillary is losing her party's presidential nomination to a man who is not even a Democrat and to another man who has not yet entered the race.  How can a candidate who began with such an enormous edge that twelve months ago she was deemed "inevitable" have fallen so far?  The usual explanation is that the Clintons are too secretive, too paranoid, and too much like lawyers.

Consider another possibility: Hillary may be dumb.  We presume otherwise because she went to Ivy League schools and because she belonged to a prominent Little Rock law firm and because she has held a couple of important offices since her husband left the White House.  But we all know the real source of her success: she has been Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton for forty years.

Hillary's undergraduate degree was in political science, a major that requires nothing more of a student than slavish aping of the radical leftist positions of one's professors.  Her admission to Yale Law School was during the heyday of affirmative action, when schools were desperate to find young women to balance the gender quotas.

The jobs Hillary had out of law school were purely ideological positions, first as a staff attorney for the so-called "Children's Defense Fund" and as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Watergate.  Hillary then tried to become a lawyer in the District of Columbia and took the bar exam for that jurisdiction.  She failed, despite the fact that two thirds of those who took the exam passed.  Soon thereafter, Hillary accepted Bill's wedding proposal and moved to Arkansas.

Her first "real" job was with the Rose Law Firm, but did she "earn" that job the way most of us would have?  Well, Hillary was hired a couple of months after her husband was sworn in as Arkansas attorney general.  That continued to be where Hillary worked as her husband was elected again and again as governor of Arkansas. 

Via: American Thinker

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The Clintons Continue To Clinton

What a mess. Every week, seemingly every other day, there is a new shady revelation about Bill and Hillary Clinton that manages to top the last one. For them there seems to be no bottom; for their supporters, there seems to be no self-respect.

The hundreds of millions of dollars from corrupt governments, billionaires with agendas and God knows who else. The server wiped so thoroughly – and no, not with a cloth – you can tell someone learned the importance of cleanliness from the blue dress. And now we learn Bill, the former president, with more money than he possibly could spend in his lifetime, sought approval to take even more from some of the worst human garbage ever to walk upright. (More on this later.)

It’s enough to make the sane wonder what the hell is wrong with these people.

But Clinton lovers are not sane. They are not rational. Hillary could give a press conference and explicitly call her supporters the dumbest people on the planet while Bill stood behind her throwing puppies and kittens into a wood-chipper, and she’d still have a base of support.

A new Quinnipiac Poll found the top three words Americans associated with her were: 1. Liar; 2. Dishonest; 3. Untrustworthy. The first positive word people associated with her was “experience,” which was given by less than half the number of respondents who answered “liar.”

That is awful, yet she is the best the Democratic Party has to offer.

As “the best,” Hillary Clinton is now so weak that Joe Biden – JOE FREAKING BIDEN – is now seriously considered a possible savior for the party’s chances.

It’s because the Clintons are known by those three words – dishonest, untrustworthy liars.

How else to explain Bill Clinton, a former president and even then a potential future first husband, asking for (and not getting) State Department permission to deliver a paid speech in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

Women are terrorized in the Congo, routinely raped and worse. Why on Earth would anyone, let alone a former president, wish to speak there and, as part of the package, have a photo-op with the country’s leaders?

Via: Townhall

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Sanders, Carson rising in Iowa polls

The latest Des Moines Register poll is out today and it gives a boost to the campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Dr. Ben Carson.

Sanders inched closer to Hillary Clinton 37-30 while Ben Carson drew nearer to Donald Trump 23-18. A significant result in the poll shows Carson and Trump tied when you factor in voters' first and second choices combined.

The poll result on the Democratic side will add a couple of levels of anxiety for Democrats over the sinking Hillary Clinton campaign, which now appers close to being in free fall.

Poll results include Vice President Joe Biden as a choice, although he has not yet decided whether to join the race. Biden captures 14 percent, five months from the first-in-the-nation vote Feb. 1. Even without Biden in the mix, Clinton falls below a majority, at 43 percent. 

"This feels like 2008 all over again," said J. Ann Selzer, pollster for the Iowa Poll. 

In that race, Clinton led John Edwards by 6 percentage points and Barack Obama by 7 points in an early October Iowa Poll. But Obama, buoyed by younger voters and first-time caucusgoers, surged ahead by late November. 

In this cycle, Sanders is attracting more first-time caucusgoers than Clinton. He claims 43 percent of their vote compared to 31 percent for Clinton. He also leads by 23 percentage points with the under-45 crowd and by 21 points among independent voters. 

Sanders, a Vermont U.S. senator, has become a liberal Pied Piper in Iowa not as a vote against Clinton, but because caucusgoers genuinely like him, the poll shows. An overwhelming 96 percent of his backers say they support him and his ideas. Just 2 percent say they're motivated by opposition to Clinton. 

Back in January, half of likely Democratic caucusgoers were unfamiliar with Sanders, who has been elected to Congress for 25 years as an independent. He has jumped from 5 percent support in January to 30 percent. Clinton, a famous public figure for decades, has dropped in that period from 56 percent to 37 percent. 

"These numbers would suggest that she can be beaten," said Steve McMahon, a Virginia-based Democratic strategist who has worked on presidential campaigns dating to 1980.

Via: American Thinker

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[AUDIO] Democratic challengers launch attacks against Clinton, party leadership

MINNEAPOLIS — Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to cement her standing as the rightful leader of the Democratic Party here Friday, but two of her challengers launched a fierce counterattack against her and a party establishment they see as trying to hand her the 2016 presidential nomination.

What began as a routine forum of candidate speeches evolved into a surprisingly dramatic day at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting, as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley issued thinly veiled attacks on Clinton and the party leadership.

Speaking from the dais, with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz sitting a few feet away, O’Malley blasted the party’s limited number of sanctioned debates as a process “rigged” in favor of the front-runner. The DNC is holding six debates, only four before February’s first caucuses in Iowa, which O’Malley argued is a disadvantage for all the candidates and a disservice to Democrats generally.

“This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before,” said O’Malley, who has struggled to gain traction in the polls. He added: “We are the Democratic Party, not the undemocratic party.”

Sanders — who later told reporters he agreed with O’Malley — lamented low Democratic turnout in last year’s midterm elections and said the party must grow beyond “politics as usual” if it hopes to produce the level of voter enthusiasm required to retain the White House in 2016.

Democratic presidential candidate and senator Bernie Sanders on Friday called for taking on “the economic and political establishment.” (Craig Lassig/Reuters)

“We need a movement which takes on the economic and political establishment, not one which is part of that establishment,” said Sanders, who is an independent but caucuses with Democrats in the Senate.

Asked later whether he was speaking specifically about Clinton, he told reporters, “I’ll let you use your imagination on that.”

The barbs from Sanders and O’Malley came as Clinton and her campaign flexed their organizational muscle here. The front-

runner and her top aides worked aggressively behind the scenes this week to secure commitments from party leaders pledging to be delegates for her in next summer’s nominating convention in Philadelphia.

Clinton’s organizational push sent a clear signal to Vice President Biden, who has been weighing a late entry into the 2016 campaign, that he would begin far behind her.

Via: Washington Post

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[VIDEO] Heilemann: New Clinton Foundation Reports Worry Hillary Supporters

Bloomberg host John Heilemann said Friday that new revelations about the Clinton Foundation are causing concern among those close to Hillary Clinton, who thought controversy surrounding the political charity had finally subsided.

“This story coming back has a lot of people nervous, because it’s something a lot of folks who are around her thought was behind them, and now it’s back again,” Heilemann said.

ABC News reported Friday morning that Bill Clinton asked the State Department for approval to give lucrative speeches in two of the world’s poorest and most brutal regimes, Congo and North Korea.

The former president has made over $100 million from speeches since leaving office in 2001, sometimes from foreign government and business interests.

Some of his most lucrative speeches were delivered while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, a fact which has raised questions about whether organizations sought to influence State Department policy by paying the Clintons.

Heilemann noted that this intriguing discovery about Bill Clinton, and concurrent discoveries about Clinton aide Huma Abedin, were drawing attention away from Hillary Clinton’s burgeoning email scandal.

“For the past few weeks, the political world has been fixated on Hillary Clinton’s emails, but now two stories have changed the subject—and not in a good way,” Heilemann said.

Via: WFB

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FBI ‘A-TEAM’ INVESTIGATING HILLARY CLINTON’S EMAIL CASE

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has put its “A-Team” of investigators on the Hillary Clinton email case to find out if Clinton violated a key section of the federal Espionage Act.

FBI investigators are determining whether Clinton violated 18 US Code 793, Fox News reported Friday. The code pertains to giving national defense information to people who are not classified to have that information.

As Breitbart News has extensively reported, Clinton’s private email server, which contained classified information, was given to the tiny Denver-based firm Platte River Networks, which employs a top Clinton operative closely tied to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. Other Clinton staffers, including her adviser Bryan Pagliano, worked on her private email server over the years.

The FBI is keeping silent about its investigation into Clinton’s emails, which it is conducting in coordination with the Department of Justice prosecutor who tried Gen. David Petraeus for leaking classified information. But a source told Fox News that violating the Espionage Act is definitely a felony.

The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 during the Woodrow Wilson administration, as the United States became involved in World War I.

Via: Breitbart

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[OPINION] Hillary Clinton’s flaws are being obscured by Trump-smoke

Aug. 28–If nothing else, Donald Trump is proving to be a fabulous smokescreen for Hillary Clinton.

While the real estate mogul bloviates and offends large swaths of the American public, Clinton rides on as the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary, Trump-smoke obscuring her own significant flaws.

Just yesterday, for example, at a campaign stop in Ohio, Clinton absurdly compared several GOPpresidential candidates’ “extreme views about women” to the views of terrorist groups.

She said: “Now, extreme views about women, we expect that from some of the terrorist groups. We expect that from people who don’t want to live in the modern world. But it’s a little hard to take coming from Republicans who want to be the president of the United States.”

I happen to share Clinton’s views on abortion and other women’s health issues, but that’s an uncalled for and offensive comparison to make. The Republican National Committee swiftly called for an apology, saying in a statement: “For Hillary Clinton to equate her political opponents to terrorists is a new low for her flailing campaign. She should apologize immediately for her inflammatory rhetoric.”

I agree. And don’t say, “But look at all the offensive things being said on the Republican side.” That doesn’t matter. Two wrongs — or 20 wrongs, or whatever — don’t make a right.

Clinton has every opportunity right now, with the Republican candidates flailing about trying to manage Trump’s xenophobic squawking, to keep to the high road. Comparing your opponents to terrorists is as low-brow as it is inaccurate.

Of course there are other issues as well. Clinton has been dismissive of the legitimate questions and concerns surrounding her use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, seemingly missing the fact that for some of us it’s not the legality of what she did but rather the overall air of dodginess.

She has repeatedly made light of the situation, once saying she started a Snapchat account because the “messages disappear all by themselves” and, when talking about whether her private server was wiped clean, saying, “What? Like with a cloth or something?”

She seems to be dialing back the cavalier attitude now, but the damage has already been done, and it appears substantial. A Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday found this: “‘Liar’ is the first word that comes to mind more than others in an open-ended question when voters think of Clinton.”

And 61 percent of respondents say Clinton “is not honest and trustworthy,” a record low for her.

That’s a rather pitiful starting point for the person many Democrats seem to believe is their most qualified candidate.

It’s easy to look at the chaos in the GOP primary and say, “Wow, is that really the best they can do?”

But if you peer through the dust Trump keeps stirring up, you can get a look at the lackluster Democratic primary and say the same thing.

rhuppke@tribpub.com

Via: Daily Witness

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[COMMENTARY] Contentions Hillary Clinton Breaks Silence on Obama’s Decimation of the Democrats

If there was one clear takeaway from Hillary Clinton’s address to the party officials assembled in Minneapolis for the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting, it was they are certainly Ready for Hillary. Sure, her largest applause lines were for the accomplishments of President Barack Obama or her husband (the majority of which she is now on the record opposing). Still, her workmanlike speech accomplished its modest goal, and the crowd did appear warm to their party’s presidential frontrunner. But while much of Clinton’s address was unremarkable cheerleading for Team Blue, one aspect of her speech was particularly noteworthy. In a rare moment of tough love for her fellow Democrats, Clinton noted that their party has been utterly decimated at the state-level. What she declined to note, however, was that this condition would yield years of hardship when the Democratic Party looks to a farm team that doesn’t exist. A generation of Democrats that were to come of age in the next decade simply will not be there. What’s more, it was Barack Obama who presided over this culling.

“The first thing I would say is we need to elect more Democrats. Okay?” Clinton told a group of Democrats in Iowa earlier this week. “You can’t have a loss like having Tom Harkin retire, and not be really motivated to not get the other Democrats in there who will stand with me.” Apparently, you can. Harkin was just one of the Democrats who were replaced by a Republican in 2014 – in his case, freshman Senator Joni Ernst.

Clinton would not expand on the nature of the Democratic Party’s predicament. Perhaps it was simply too painful to do so. 2014 saw the Democrats lose nine U.S. Senate seats and resulted in a 54-seat GOP majority in the upper chamber. The Republicans confounded political observers who presumed that the party remained overextended in the House following their 2010 landslide victories. The Republicans entered 2015 with 247 seats, up from the 234-seat majority they had heading into last year’s midterms and the largest majority for the party since 1947. But the federal legislature is largely composed of politicians who cut their teeth in state-level legislative bodies, and it was on the local level that Democrats saw their influence contract dramatically.

When Barack Obama took office in 2008, he did so on the crest of a pro-Democratic wave – the second consecutive liberal electoral tsunami – that swept hundreds of Democratic politicians into office along with him. By 2009, Democrats controlled 62 of the nation’s 99 legislative chambers. Come January of 2015, Republicans controlled 69 of 99 of state-level legislative houses – a handful of which were secured when state legislators, sensing the wind’s shifting direction, switched parties. At the gubernatorial level, the scale of the wave was most acutely felt. Republicans were expected to lose at least four executive mansions. Instead, they lost only one and picked up four new governorships for a total of 31. By 2015, 32 lieutenant governors and 29 secretaries of state all called themselves Republicans. In 23 states, Republicans controlled all the elected branches of government.

“It is not just enough to elect more members of the Senate and more members of the House in Washington,” Clinton told her fellow Democrats earlier this week. “We need more members in the state Senate. We need more members in the state house.” But the painful scope of this project is so staggering that even Hillary Clinton could not bear to be fully honest about it.

The former secretary of state revisited the themes of her Iowa address in Minneapolis on Friday. “I’m not taking a single primary voter or caucus-goer for granted. I’m building an organization in all 50 states and territories, with hundreds of thousands of volunteers who will help Democrats win races up and down the ticket. Not just the presidential campaign,” she said. “Look, in 2010, Republicans routed us on redistricting, not because they won Congress but because they won state legislatures.”

We can be charitable and presume that Clinton meant that, because of the GOP’s victories in 2010, the party went on to control much of the reapportionment process in 2011 – at least, in those states that continued to have partisan redistricting commissions. But the scale of the GOP’s victories in 2014 (you can’t gerrymander a state) are indicative of the truism that all the cleverly-drawn districts in the world cannot overcome a decisive mandate from a critical mass of voters.

Republicans were in a fortunate position when decennial reapportionment took place after the 2010 elections, and they took great advantage of their position. They did so, in fact, in the same way Democrats had for generations when their party commanded substantial state-level and federal legislative majorities for much of the 20th Century. But pro-GOP maps aren’t the only things keeping Democratic majorities down. By virtue of the “inefficient clustering” of Democratic voters, as Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman observed, Democrats are going to have trouble converting their popular vote share into a proportionate percentage of seats.

“The way that the districts are packed and the increasing tendency for like-minded people to cluster together means that Democrats have to win upwards of 55 percent of the overall House vote to come close to claiming a majority of the House seats,” theWashington Post’s Chris Cillizza summarized. Hillary Clinton might have coattails if she were to win the White House, but it’s extremely unlikely that the will be that long; particularly given the fact that she is seeking a historically atypical third consecutive term for her party. When the president governs as Barack Obama has, flouting the will of the electorate and enraging his opponents far more than he energized his base (the Affordable Care Act and his unilateral executive actions on immigration, to name two catalysts), it invites the kind of routs that the Democrats experienced in 2010 and 2014.

It may be comforting to contend that the game is rigged and Democrats would do better politically if only the winds of fate had prevented Republicans from controlling the redistricting process, but it’s a fable. Hillary Clinton is taking a step toward being honest about her party’s predicament with its members, but she cannot be entirely forthright about the scale of the problem without indicting Barack Obama’s approach to governance. That is not happening any time soon. Democrats appreciate Barack Obama’s aggressive style, and they have not yet come around to the realization that it has put their party in the worst position it has been in since prior to the New Deal. Hillary Clinton is taking the first steps toward diagnosing her party’s malady, but she cannot accurately prescribe a remedy without alienating the voters she needs to win the nomination.

There will be no emerging from the wilderness anytime soon.

Via: Commentary Magazine

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Hillary Clinton’s Watchdog Had Something No Other Secretary Of State Ever Had

One congressional leader is saying there could be a big problem with the group that was tasked with holding Hillary Clinton accountable during her time as secretary of state.

Senate Judiciary Chariman Chuck Grassley sent a letter to Chair of Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency as well as Secretary of State John Kerry with questions about the State Department’s inspector general during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.

The State Department IG had an interim head for more than five years, and Grassley want to know whether Clinton was involved in keeping the position temporary.

Grassley called the absence “egregious” and pointed out that the temporary IG was there for Clinton’s entire term, making her the only secretary of state to never sit under a full-fledged watchdog since the IG was created in 1957.

“Every agency needs a permanent, independent inspector general,” Grassley said in a statement. “The position is too important to assign to a placeholder.  An acting inspector general doesn’t have the mandate to lead, and he or she might not be able to withstand pushback from an agency that doesn’t want to cooperate with oversight.”

Grassley has requested a slew of record related to the temporary inspector, Harold Geisel, and why he was in charge for so long. He also pointed out that in the short time since a permanent inspector general was put in place, substantive revelations have come out about a top Hillary aide inappropriately influencing an ambassador nomination.

“The Obama Administration should answer for why it allowed that to happen,” Grassley said in a statement. “There’s been no transparency on the reason for the lack of an appointment for so long. “We’ll never know the extent of the damage to good governance caused by this lapse, but it’s fair to say some of the problems exposed lately probably could have been prevented with a permanent inspector general in place.”

Via Daily Caller

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Clinton Camp Says One-Fifth of Delegates Secured for Nomination

As Hillary Clinton's campaign seeks to project dominance in a field that could soon include Vice President Joe Biden, her top advisers are touting a decisive edge on a little-discussed metric: superdelegate commitments. 

At the Democratic National Committee meeting in Minneapolis, where Clinton spoke on Friday, senior Clinton campaign officials are claiming that she has already secured one-fifth of the pledges needed to win the Democratic presidential nomination. They come from current and former elected officials, committee officeholders, and other party dignitaries.

The campaign says that Clinton currently has about 130 superdelegates publicly backing her, but a person familiar with recent conversations in Minneapolis said that officials are telling supporters and the undecided in the last few days that private commitments increase that number to more than 440—about 20 percent of the number of delegates she would need to secure the nomination.

ALSO: Why Rank-and-File Democrats Are Hoping Biden Runs

EARLIER: Why Hillary Clinton Decided E-mail Issue Was No Joke

THE REPUBLICANS: Donald Trump Says He Wants to Raise Taxes on Himself

After her speech, Clinton told reporters that her campaign's attention to delegate totals is about ensuring that her support from voters translates into the nomination. “This is really about how you put the numbers together to secure the nomination. As some of you might recall, in 2008 I got a lot of votes but I didn’t get enough delegates. And so I think it’s understandable that my focus is going to be on delegates as well as votes this time,” she said.

Clinton campaign aides at the DNC meeting are privately briefing uncommitted superdelegates there on their mounting totals as a way to coax them to get them aboard the Clinton train now. Campaign manager Robby Mook, chief administrative officer Charlie Baker, political director Amanda Renteria, and state campaigns and political engagement director Marlon Marshall are among the top Clinton aides in attendance.

Final numbers are still in flux, but current estimates peg the total number of delegates to next summer’s presidential nominating convention at about 4,491, meaning that a candidate would need 2,246 to win. The Clinton camp’s claim to more than 440 delegates means she’s already wrapped up the support of more than 60 percent of the approximately 713 superdelegates who, under party rules, are among those who cast votes for the nomination, along with delegates selected by rank-and-file voters in primaries and caucuses beginning next February. Delegate totals won’t be finalized until the DNC determines the number of bonus delegates awarded to states, a party official said.

To be sure, Clinton had a superdelegate edge early against Barack Obama in 2008, and superdelegates are free to change their allegiance at any time between now and next summer's convention. But Clinton is ahead of the pace she had eight years ago in securing these commitments, and her support from the core of the establishment represented by these superdelegates is arguably the most tangible evidence of the difficulty Biden would have overtaking her with a late-starting campaign.

While Clinton said earlier this week that Biden “should have the space and the opportunity to decide what he wants to do,” her campaign is at the same time flexing its muscles to stress the strength of her candidacy. The campaign this week unveiled its first endorsement from a sitting member of the Obama Cabinet, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, who just happens to be a former governor of Iowa and who spent Wednesday touring the state with Clinton.

The Clinton campaign also released memos on Thursday touting the strength of its field operations in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. The memos include specific tallies of thousands of volunteer commitments, dozens of paid organizers, and offices opened, including 11 in Iowa.

Barring some major scandal or controversy, and given Hillary and Bill Clinton's long-standing ties to Democratic Party elites, overcoming her superdelegate edge would be quite a challenge for Biden or the major candidates already competing against her for the nomination, including Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

The 300-or-so gap between Clinton's public and private superdelegate commitments derives mostly from state party officials who have yet to reveal their backing of the frontrunner, but have privately pledged to cast their convention votes for the former first lady, according to the person familiar with the campaign's tally.

In their Minneapolis discussions intended to persuade additional uncommitted superdelegates to commit to Clinton, her team is taking care not to mention Biden, but the message is clear: Much of the party establishment is supporting Clinton and the math is in her favor. In 2008, Clinton’s team made a version of this argument before being overtaken by Barack Obama. After Obama took the lead in overall delegates, his campaign began to make a comparable argument about the mathematical inevitability of his ultimate victory.

The attention to delegate counts, Clinton said Friday, was the “result of the lessons that I learned the last time –how important it is to be as well-organized and focused from the very beginning on delegates and those who are superdelegates."

Via: Bloomberg

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Group: Emails show Clinton, aides mixed State Department, foundation business

Washington (CNN)Ten days after the 2012 Benghazi terrorist attacks, the top foreign policy adviser at the Clinton Foundation had a potentially lucrative proposal on which to seek guidance from Hillary Clinton's aides at the State Department.

The email from Amitabh Desai to Cheryl Mills, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Clinton, describes a pitch by Stella O'Leary, a Democratic donor active in Irish American causes.

O'Leary, according to Desai's email, said Clinton had "firmly instructed" her to set up a not-for-profit organization -- one that qualifies for 501(c)3 status under U.S. tax laws -- called Friends of the Clinton Centre.

In his email, Desai says: "I also asked if the new org could be flexible so that any funding raised could be used in whatever manner WJC" -- the initials of former President Bill Clinton -- "and HRC wish in Ireland and Northern Ireland, and not restricted to support only the current iteration of the Clinton Centre in Enniskillen."

The email is among dozens that have been turned over by the State Department to the conservative advocacy group Citizens United, which has filed several lawsuits seeking documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The group says the documents could help provide information about how they allege Clinton and her aides mixed State Department business with the Clinton Foundation's fundraising efforts.

It's an issue that has dented the image of Clinton's presidential campaign. Clinton's use of a private email server for government business while she ran the State Department has now grown into a controversy and has spawned an FBI investigation.

Desai's email from September 21, 2012, provided to CNN by Citizens United, includes details of how the new organization would be overseen by board members drawn from other parts of the Clinton orbit, including officials from the Clinton Foundation, such as longtime Clinton friend Doug Band.

Citizens United did not provide CNN with an exhaustive inventory of all emails it has recovered from the State Department. It first provided some to The Washington Post, which published a story on Thursday afternoon.

But officials at Citizens United say the emails show discussion of a proposal to establish a "slush fund" for use by the Clintons. The email chain doesn't provide any indication of how Clinton or her aides followed up on the idea.

O'Leary, in a phone interview with CNN, laughed at the idea her proposal would be interpreted as a slush fund. She doesn't specifically remember the details of the email but said she established the 501(c)3 organization with approval from the Clintons. She said it has raised about $55,000 for an international summer school program to bring kids from the Balkans and other conflict zones to Northern Ireland.

It was, O'Leary says, "a good-will effort on my part to honor him for everything he has done in Northern Ireland."

O'Leary suggested that Clinton opponents are using the Clinton name and the email controversy to raise money. The Clintons are "the easiest people around which to make money," she said.

The timing of the email discussion is also notable because at the time, Clinton was wrestling with the beginnings of the controversy over the Benghazi terrorism attacks.

Mills sent Desai's inquiry on to Huma Abedin, another Clinton aide at the State Department, with a comment saying that the proposal was new to Mills.

Abedin, in turn, copied another Clinton aide, Jake Sullivan, noting that Sullivan was in the meeting at which Clinton and O'Leary had discussed the Friends of the Clinton Centre proposal. Abedin adds that Clinton hadn't made any commitments to the O'Leary proposal.

The Clinton Centre is a conference facility built on the site of the 1987 IRA Remembrance Day bombing in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland. President Clinton, who helped broker the Irish peace accords, dedicated the building to peace in Ireland.

New York state corporate records list a group called Friends of the Clinton Centre, registered as a not-for-profit organization in 2013. The address for the organization is that of a New York City personal-injury law firm. O'Leary confirmed that was the organization she founded.

A Clinton campaign spokesman referred questions about the O'Leary proposal to the Clinton Foundation. A person familiar with the matter said the Friends of the Clinton Centre isn't affiliated with the Clinton Foundation.

Another batch of emails from 2012 sent by Abedin detail her efforts to help organize dinners in Ireland during a visit by Hillary Clinton.

The emails sent by Abedin on her State Department email account include discussions about dinners with officials from Teneo, a consulting firm that employed Abedin at the same time she worked for Clinton at the State Department. Abedin had left her official role as a State Department employee but was working as a contractor for both the State Department and Teneo.

The outside consulting work was allowed at the time because Abedin was classified as a special government employee. But the arrangement has drawn controversy and is the subject of investigation by Sen. Chuck Grassley, who says he is concerned it may have violated rules against conflicts of interest.

Teneo was founded by Brand, a longtime Clinton friend who served on the Clinton Foundation board.

"These emails illustrate why there are legitimate concerns about the Department's use of the SGE designation and the blurring of the lines between the official business of the State Department, the private interests of Teneo, and the fundraising interests for various entities under the personal control of Secretary and former President Clinton," Grassley wrote in a letter Wednesday to Abedin.

An attorney for Abedin didn't respond to a request for comment.

Nick Merrill, a Clinton campaign spokesman, rejected the idea that there was anything wrong with Abedin's activities.

"This is someone who has spent nearly two decades in public service, and is widely known for her integrity and tireless work ethic," Merrill said in a statement. "After the birth of her son, she took maternity leave. The IG had questions about the details of her leave, Huma answered. Anything beyond that injected into the public sphere is unfounded and from partisans in Congress with a clear agenda. These emails serve to reinforce that these allegations are baseless. It's not surprising, but it is disappointing."

But David Bossie, president of Citizens United, said, "As a result of federal court orders, Citizens United expects to receive more documents from Hillary Clinton's tenure at the State Department and we look forward to sharing those documents with the American people. It's critical that American's understand how the Clinton machine operated inside the State Department."

Via: CNN

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[VIDEO] MSNBC’s Scarborough: Hillary’s Republican/ISIS Comparison Is ‘Gutter Politics At Its Worst’

Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin criticized the double standard for Republicans and Democrats, saying that if a Republican said something like what Hillary Clinton argued in comparing pro-life Americans to ISIS the “world would come to a halt.”

On Friday’s “Morning Joe” Scarborough insisted Hillary’s comments “to be so hyperbolic and insulting, and quite frankly, it’s gutter politics at its worst to compare people to radical terrorists that cut off people’s head and blow up grandmoms.”

Mika Brzezinski: All right, the RNC was quick to respond to the comments but I’ll let you do it first.

Joe Scarborough: It was disgusting, it was absolutely disgusting. Hillary Clinton saying—

Brzezinski: I was trying to be careful.

Scarborough: No, I mean, just let’s tell the truth. She wanted us to talk about this. She wanted to throw a bright shiny object out there.

Brzezinski: Look at the bird, is what I said when you were sitting right here.

Scarborough: So they don’t talk about the email scandal. And so she has to be so hyperbolic and insulting, and quite frankly, it’s gutter politics at its worst to compare people to radical terrorists that cut off people’s head and blow up grandmoms.

Brzezinski: Alright.

Scarborough: No, it’s not all right and we have seen by reporting what these terrorists do to young girls. The sexual slavery is absolutely appalling, and what Hillary Clinton did is compare somebody who is pro-life, which is close to 50% of Americans, to radical terrorists. This is like Barack Obama. I mean, is this the radicalism? We have been talking ability the craziness of the Republican Party. But is this the sick radicalism that is now infecting the Democratic Party, that if you’re Barack Obama, you compare Chuck Schumer to people shouting “death to America” in Iran? if you’re Hillary Clinton, you compare pro-life Democrats and Republicans to ISIS? What Happened here yesterday? This is so over the top.

Mark Halperin: If a Republican did this, the world would come to a halt.

Scarborough: The world would come to a halt.

Halperin: It should be condemned in strong terms. And I’m hoping and I’m suspecting she’ll may take it back today.

Via: Daily Caller

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