Free Republic

Jeb adviser James Baker to keynote J Street conference Leading talk show host and best-selling author Mark Levin assailed Jeb Bush last night over the revelation that one of his top foreign policy advisers, James Baker, will keynote an anti-Israel conference this weekend. The annual conference of the activist group J Street features an array of anti-Israel speakers, including proponents of the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divest (BDS) movement, which seeks Israel’s destruction, and advocates for the terrorist group Hamas. Jeb Bush’s selection of Baker as a foreign policy adviser has sparked concern among conservatives and in the Jewish and pro-Israel...

It was less than two weeks ago that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured the nation that her “homebrew” email server was safely secure in her home in Chappaqua, New York. She insisted that the hardware was fortified behind a locked door and had a Secret Service detail mentoring it night and day, as though the greatest security threat that system faced was via a physical attack by a team of cartoonish cat burglars. Nevertheless, Clinton insisted that the safeguards around the email system she constructed out of “convenience” were “effective and secure.” She added that “there were no...

In my column on the plea agreement the Obama Justice Department allowed David Petreaus to enter after it was discovered that he mishandled classified information, I noted that he had been required to sign a separation agreement when he left the CIA. It is called a “Security Exit Form” and is obviously the CIA version of the State Department departure form described in Jim’s post (and linked in Shannen’s column) that Secretary Clinton should have signed upon leaving government service. The prosecutors’ outline of the evidence against Petraeus includes the following (at pages 11-12, paragraph 27): [O]n or about November...

Despite the Obama White House best efforts to derail an election win by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Israeli election, Likud won 30 seats. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a come-from-behind victory in Israel’s election on Wednesday after tacking hard to the right in the final days of campaigning, including abandoning a commitment to negotiate a Palestinian state.

TEL AVIV – A non-profit at the center of controversy regarding its campaign to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Tuesday’s polls has removed the State Department from its website’s list of “partners,” WND has learned.Below is a snapshot taken by WND last month, which clearly shows the U.S. Department of State, replete with a logo, listed as a “partner” of the OneVoice Movement on the group’s website. image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2015/03/state-department-scrubbed-600.jpgInternet Archive’s Wayback Machine also has a cache image taken in 2014 showing the State Department listed on the same “partner” page.The State Department logo is missing from the current...

Police opened 51 investigations on Tuesday related to alleged voting fraud ranging from impersonation, stolen ballots and threats against ballot officials, and 23 suspects were being pursued. Several attempts to subvert the voting process were noted in the north – four voters who arrived at their designated voting stations in Nahariya, Kiryat Tiv'on and Kiryat Ata found that someone had already voted in their name. Local police began investigating each incident. Police said that one man claimed that someone else may have used his lost drivers license to vote in his name. A similar incident was reported in Afula where...

Piling on more embarrassment for Hillary Clinton amid a row about her emails, U.S. officials revealed Thursday that during her time as secretary of state she had declined a government-issued cellphone. Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Clinton was "not issued a State Department BlackBerry, and that wasn't a requirement — no one is required to be issued a State Department BlackBerry." The revelation is likely to raise more concerns about national security as well as speculation that the former first lady may have been hiding information that could embarrass her in her presidential campaign. Clinton is at the center of a...

In her Tuesday press conference defending her reliance on a private email system while serving as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton claimed that the "vast majority" of emails were sent to other State Department employees and therefore automatically archived. But State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Friday told reporters that it wasn't until last month that the State Department started automatically archiving emails — and it's only being done for senior staff. "Our goal is to apply this [automatic archiving] to all employee mailboxes by the end of 2016," Psaki said, according to Politico. On Tuesday, Clinton said, "It was...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s efforts to douse the growing furor over her possibly illegal private email system are not going well.The Obama White House, which claims the president knew nothing about Clinton’s surreptitious email system, unceremoniously threw the former cabinet member under the bus this week.“Frankly, the secretary’s handling of her own personal email and the maintenance of [her] personal email inbox is something that I’m not going to comment on and not particularly interested in,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest.President Obama, who reportedly detests the Clintons, may himself have played a role in revealing Hillary’s...

Transparency: Hillary Clinton insists she did everything by the book, that she broke no laws and heeded all regulations. That book is obviously not the State Department records management handbook. The government's book says that you don't get to keep materials, classified or unclassified, in your personal possession and then get to sift through them at your leisure to decide which ones the government that paid you gets to see. All documents are the property of the government. The State Department determines which ones are returned to you. As Shannen W. Coffin, a contributing editor at National Review and senior...

Full title: Citing Misconduct and Misrepresentation by Hillary Clinton and State Department, Judicial Watch Asks Federal Court to Reopen Lawsuit Seeking Information on Top Clinton Aide Huma Abedin (Washington, DC) – Following up on revelations of the secret email accounts created by Hillary Clinton and other top State Department officials, Judicial Watch announced that it has asked a federal court to reopen a closed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case that sought records about Huma Abedin, who had been Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary State Hillary Clinton ( Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:13-cv-01363)). Judicial Watch’s...

Clinton Faces Broader Email Deception Issue Involving Entire State Department MAR 12, 2015 • BY MICHAEL ASTRUE Hillary Clinton’s email problems do not end with her illegal privatization of government communications or her Nixonian stonewalling of questions about how much of her public record she has destroyed in order to avoid public scrutiny. She must also defend her broader record at the State Department—a record of building information technology systems designed to keep the vast majority of public records from becoming public. In 2009 the State Department began an overhaul of its email system in order to bring its system...

Since the revelations involving former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server exploded last week, questions have swirled regarding her account’s level of information security. “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email,” Clinton averred at a brief press conference on Tuesday. Some are… skeptical about the assertion that the nation’s top diplomat never received any classified material via her email account at an agency that is often criticized for over-classifying information.“I would assume that more than 50 percent of what the secretary of state dealt with was classified,” said an unnamed former official...

Her core reason yesterday for deleting personal e-mails and refusing to turn over her server is that there are/were private communications on there, including between her and Bill, and no one has a right to see those. Now here’s Bill himself saying nope. Say what you will about Frank and Claire Underwood, at least he’d never leave her twisting in the wind in the middle of a scandal.But wait. These are the Clintons. Every syllable must be parsed and re-parsed for hedging. Typically they don’t proceed to an outright lie until they’ve been cornered on their lawyerly non-answers. What...

At one point in Hillary Clinton’s slightly less than marathon press conference on Tuesday, the former secretary of state insisted that there were no security breaches of her personal “homebrew” email server. How could she possibly know this? The secretary of state’s emails represent a high-value target for cyber hackers operating out of foreign intelligence agencies, and a breach is unlikely to leave a trace of any activity that the layman or even a cyber-intelligence professional would notice. Just ask the State Department. “Overlooked in the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, is the fact...

“Convenience.” “Convenience.” “Convenience.” “Convenience.” Hillary Clinton’s reliance on that word during her news conference at the United Nations on Tuesday minimized the exemption from standard procedure that she allowed herself when she decided — all on her own — to use only a private email address for both personal and government business. She told reporters that she hadn’t wanted to be weighed down by a second electronic device. It wasn’t secrecy that motivated her. It was purse space and pinkie strain. And behind her forced smile, which was practically cemented in place, she seemed put out by all the skepticism...

Just when you thought the Mullah-butt-licking Obama regime couldn't be any more deeply infiltrated. Somehow the newspapers never had much to say about this, and when forced to -i.e. wedding announcements- the Iranian ancestry and birthplace of Vanessa Kerry's husband are -untypically- omitted. So as Obama and John Kerry set-out to strike a grand bargain with the Mullahs (and flush Israel down the drain), you would think this to be a pertinent fact, one that really ought to be public- or at least it would have been back before this country began to forget anything that ever mattered (and how the world works).  With deep Muslim infiltration of our...

"The government strongly opposed militant forms of Islam, which it viewed as a threat to the regime." So said the State Department's 2008 human rights report (published in February 2009) on a certain North African nation. "Although there is no explicit law guaranteeing religious freedom, in practice the government generally respected the right to observe one's religion," said the report. This did not mean, however, that it allowed the full "free exercise" of religion that is guaranteed by our First Amendment. "Although there is no law prohibiting conversion from Islam," said the report, "the government prohibits efforts to proselytize Muslims...

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emerged before a horde of press at the United Nations today to defend herself over using a personal email address while in the office — and defended her role as arbiter of what emails were official, thus required to be turned over, and which were personal and could be trashed.Clinton has been under fire for revelations that she only used personal email and a home-based server while serving as the nation’s top diplomat. A late-night tweet nearly a week ago — “I want the public to see my email. I asked State to...

All over Twitter you can find negative reactions to Hillary Clinton’s just-concluded press conference. To me, the most important part of her press conference was her statement that was an obvious, flat-out lie: She said the e-mail server was initially set up for use by former president Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton insisted that there were “numerous safeguards” in place, adding there were “no security breaches.” One hacker broke into Hillary’s account in 2013 and leaked several messages to Kremlin-funded RT. Beyond that example, if her server is being privately managed, there’s no way for, say, State Department security professionals or...