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The overlap between Hillary Clinton’s State Department, her family’s foundation, and a consulting firm run by members of her inner circle has reaped a windfall for all involved, steering tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton family and generating lucrative contracts for a consulting practice run by a close confidante, an internal memo reveals. The 2011 memo, authored by Clinton confidante Doug Band, reveals for the first time the precise financial flows between the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, Band’s firm Teneo Consulting, and the Clinton family’s private business endeavors. The Band memo also provides additional details on...

In a 2011 memo published by Wikileaks, Clinton underling Doug Band described how he secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in free travel and gifts for Bill Clinton and his family. While Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton did not disclose any gifts or free travel, as required. The gifts were first reported by Alana Goodman in the Daily Mail: ‘In support of the President’s for-profit activity, we also have solicited and obtained, as appropriate, in-kind services for the President and his family – for personal travel, hospitality, vacation and the like,’ wrote Band in the Nov. 16, 2011 memo...

A 12 page memo (pdf embed below) from Doug Band, a long-term Clinton aide and business operative, has cast sunlight into exactly how Bill and Hillary Clinton accumulated wealth after leaving the White House.  The 2011 memo shows how Band leveraged corporate clients to benefit the Clinton Foundation, and the personal income of Bill Clinton specifically. It is a rather complex dynamic to understand.  Suggest beginning with this video news segment from Morning Joe

The State Department acknowledged Wednesday that someone in its public affairs bureau made a “deliberate” request that several minutes of tape be cut from the video of a 2013 press briefing in which a reporter asked if the administration had lied about secret talks with Iran. The embarrassing admission by State Department spokesman John Kirby came three weeks after another spokesperson insisted that a “glitch” had caused the gap, discovered only last month by the reporter whose questioning had mysteriously disappeared. “This wasn’t a technical glitch, this was a deliberate step to excise the video,” Kirby told reporters. Kirby said...

New emails released by WikiLeaks in connection with its dump of John Podesta’s email server indicate that Qatar, an Islamist state in the Persian gulf, gave former President Bill Clinton a check for $1 million for his birthday. “[Qatar] Would like to see WJC ‘for five minutes’ in NYC, to present $1 million check that Qatar promised for WJC’s birthday in 2011,” Ami Desai, director of foreign policy for the Clinton Foundation, wrote in 2012.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta’s membership on the executive board of an energy company, Joule Unlimited, which received millions from a Putin-connected Russian government fund, also included “75,000 common shares,” according to an email exchang uncovered by the Wikileaks hacks. In the newly-uncovered email exchanged under the subject “Podesta Outstanding Docs for Joule,” Eryn Sepp, who was an assistant to Podesta at the Center for American Progress, forwarded a message to Podesta from Mark C. Solakian, who was Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Joule Unlimited Technologies, Inc. “It is my understanding that John transferred the resulting 75,000...

The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats. No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September. But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand...

For twenty years – long before 9/11 – the danger of terrorists armed with surface to air missiles shooting at passenger planes has been the secret fear of many top political leaders. In the late 90s, a terrorist network was nabbed trying to bring them into Newark Airport, but the airline industry and the government have done nothing to equip passenger airplanes with any defense against these always deadly missiles. Now Barack Obama has committed the ultimate sin: He has let 20,000 surface-to-air missiles escape from military depots in Libya. According to ABC News “U.S. officials had once thought there...

'Jackie Kennedy of China' at Center of Political Drama By JEREMY PAGE, BRIAN SPEGELE and STEVE EDER The wife of sacked Communist Party official Bo Xilai made quite an impression when she showed up in Mobile, Ala., 15 years ago with her young son in tow. Denver lawyer Ed Byrne, whom she had hired to represent Chinese companies embroiled in a legal mess in U.S. federal court, was struck by her brains, charm and beauty. Gu Kailai, he says, seemed like the "Jackie Kennedy of China." Gu Kailai was close to a British businessman who died mysteriously. . The business...

Freedom: As South Sudan joyfully celebrated its independence from Sudan, President Obama hailed it as the fruit of partnership, togetherness, hope and unity. South Sudanese, however, hailed President Bush. Proudly wearing the black cowboy hat given to him by President Bush, South Sudan's new president, Salva Kiir Mayardit, couldn't have made a stronger statement about who made his country's independence possible after 50 years of warfare. "It was George Bush and the Christian fundamentalists who heard the cry of South Sudan," affirmed a South Sudanese man quoted by the Los Angeles Times. But to hear the White House — in...

TAMPA — Her business card is utterly ordinary. No big titles. No hint of connections with the military and political elite. It lists her address, her phone number and her name in elegant script: "Honorable Jill G. Kelley." But the outsized portrait of herself that Kelley presents to the world will fit on no card. It's seen in her emails to Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and others. She drops names. She mentions lunch at the White House in a casual aside, one of three visits she has made there in the last six weeks. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan...

Wednesday afternoon the story broke in Baton Rouge media that the Kenilworth Science & Technology School had been raided by the FBI. The FBI indicated that the raid, which evidently was conducted to gather material evidence in the form of documents and computers, was not a matter of public safety. As a result, it probably was not related to a report earlier this year that a teacher at the school was accused of having inappropriate pictures of children on his cell phone. Had those charges stuck, that would have been the second scandal of a sexual nature involving a Gulenist...

According to a declassified order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as of 2011, the US National Security Agency was "acquiring" more than 250 million "internet communications" each year under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) — the statute that allows the NSA to collect the content of internet communications. The order states that the "vast majority" of these communications were obtained from internet service providers under PRISM, and that only nine percent of of the total internet communications acquired by the NSA were part of its "upstream" collection practices, which pull data directly from telecommunications cables. The...

The State Department announced Wednesday that it has added two people to the federal list of designated terrorists, one of whom was once detained at Guantanamo Bay military prison. Ayrat Nasimovich Vakhitov, one of the newly added jihadists, was a former detainee at Guantanamo for less than two years from June 2002 until February 2004 before being turned over to Russian officials in his home country. Turkish authorities recently arrested Vahkitov in connection with the June 29 suicide bombings at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport that killed 42 people. While no group has claimed responsibility for the attack, U.S. and Turkish authorities...

As the Clinton-led State Department dragged its feet against Boko Haram, Clinton Foundation donors made millions from Nigerian oil fields The attacks on Jan. 20, 2012, began not so much as an explosion but as an earthquake. ....In coordinated bombings at 23 separate locations in the city of Kano, including police headquarters and military barracks, the group left one of Africa’s largest cities in disarray and panic. The January attacks killed more than 185 people—Africa’s worst terrorism since the 1998 al-Qaeda attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. ...Boko Haram often showed up better equipped than the Nigerian military...prominently...

Pentagon officials were so concerned with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's push in 2011 to back Libyan rebels against Muammar Qaddafi that they opened their own back-channels with Qaddafi to try and prevent the U.S. from entering the civil war, according to a report that cited newly uncovered audio tapes.

Washington, D.C. – Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy (SC-04) released the following statement after the committee’s Majority released a mark of its investigative report: “Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were heroes who gave their lives in service to our country. Their bravery and the courageous actions of so many others on the ground that night should be honored. “When the Select Committee was formed, I promised to conduct this investigation in a manner worthy of the American people’s respect, and worthy of the memory of those who died. That is exactly what my colleagues...

There are a few potentially important details surrounding the timeline leading to Bowe Bergdahl’s release that might deserve some discussion. Truth Revolt supplies some details on the timeline: This week’s [the week of Bergdahl’s release] secret diplomacy was not the first time the U.S. government had engaged the Taliban in an effort to negotiate a prisoner swap for the release of Bergdahl. In 2011, State Department officials held a series of meetings with Taliban leaders in Doha. In Congress, there was bipartisan opposition to any release of Guantanamo prisoners. After the negotiations were made public in early 2012 by Sen....

Evidence is mounting that Omar Mateen, the gunman who murdered 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando early Sunday morning, was himself gay. Mateen's horrifying attack on Pulse nightclub was initially thought to be a homophobic attack rooted in extremist Islamic ideology. But now his ex-wife and former security school classmate have stepped forward to say they think Mateen was gay, the same day it was revealed that Mateen had made at least a dozen previous visits to Pulse, and was a user of gay dating app Jack'd. Mateen's first wife, Sitora Yusufiy, whom he met online in 2009...

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton is making her second fundraising visit to Chicago on Tuesday, attending an event at the home of securities trader Rajiv Fernando. In 2011, Obama appointed Fernando to serve on the International Security Advisory Board, a panel that was charged with advising then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on sensitive security matters. After the appointment, ABC News raised questions about Fernando’s qualifications for the panel. Days after the report, which also noted Fernando’s contributions to the Clinton Foundation, the trader stepped down from the board, saying he did not have time to serve. Clinton is asking...