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A former Department of State official is headed to prison for conspiring to steer $2 million in sole-source micro-dairy contracts to his son’s business, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Kenneth Apple faces up to 20 years behind bars after a federal jury in Virginia convicted him Thursday of ensuring the State Department awarded four contracts for creating milk-processing factories in Iraq to Xtreme Global Logistics Solutions (XGLS). Apple’s son, Jonathan Apple, owned 50 percent of the Montana-based company, the DOJ said. Apple — a State Department agricultural advisor from Oregon in charge of micro-dairy contract oversight in Iraq...

Lawyers for Hillary Clinton made their second court filing in a week on Friday aiming to block a federal judge from having her be deposed as part of an ongoing open records lawsuit connected to her email setup. In a filing at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Clinton’s legal team called the request from conservative organization Judicial Watch “futile and inappropriate.” The group is relying on “nothing more than speculation” by claiming that Clinton’s use of a private server was a deliberate effort to thwart the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the former secretary of State’s...

WASHINGTON -- GOP lawmakers are asking for a freeze on transfers from Guantanamo Bay and more information about past transfers after one detainee released to Uruguay went missing and another was named a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department. As Congress blocks President Obama's efforts to close the prison facility, the White House is trying to quickly deplete Gitmo's population. The transfer of two detainees to Serbia was announced Monday, bringing the population down to 76. There were 242 terror suspects at Guantanamo when Obama took office. On Wednesday, the State Department issued the designations of Aslan Avgazarovich...

WASHINGTON -- A State Department official today blamed the media for perpetuating the "cliche" term "lone wolf" to describe terrorists carrying out attacks on their own. At a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting to review government efforts to stem the influence of ISIS online, Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel said the terror group was targeting "places with unhappy youth," unemployed sympathizers and the mentally ill. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) emphasized that "when we say 'lone wolf,' these folks that are engaged in this cause of theirs, that attack Americans, that attack all around the...

The State Department paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxpayers grants to an Israeli group that used the money to build a campaign to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli parliamentary elections, a congressional investigation concluded Tuesday. Some $350,000 was sent to OneVoice, ostensibly to support the group’s efforts to back Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement negotiations. But OneVoice used the money to build a voter database, train activists and hire a political consulting firm with ties to President Obama’s campaign — all of which set the stage for an anti-Netanyahu campaign, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations...

Last week was another particularly bad week for Hillary Clinton. The media can make believe all they want, but she got pummeled. First, FBI Director James Comey announced she shouldn’t be indicted, then goes on to establish that she should be indicted by laying out chapter and verse how she failed to properly handle sensitive Emails; and by using an unsecured server in foreign, unfriendly counties put us all in danger. There was no good news in Comey’s announcement and as a result by 54/37 Americans think she should be indicted. Comey’s testimony before Congress which was designed to say,...

The FBI rounded up a network of deep-cover Russian spies last year after the group came close to placing an agent near a Cabinet official in the Obama administration, a senior FBI counterspy said Monday as the bureau released once-secret documents on the case. ...U.S. officials said it was Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Mr. Figliuzzi said in an interview that the FBI decided to end its more than 10-year-long counterspy investigation of the network because of concerns that the spies were “getting very close to their objective.” “These 10 Russian officers were sent to the U.S. on a...

The Council of American Islamic Relations [CAIR] may tout itself as an “organization that challenges stereotypes of Islam and Muslims,” and as group that was formed “to challenge anti-Muslim discrimination nationwide.” But in fighting the good fight against hate, at least one of its regional leaders demonizes Jews as the source of Muslims’ problems. “Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah?” CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid asked in a May 25 sermon at the Islamic Organization of North America mosque in Warren, Mich. “They are the Jews, they are the Jews,” he answered himself in Arabic. Aside from...

President Obama said Saturday that he is "concerned" by the FBI assessment that the State Department has acted carelessly in handling classified information. "I am concerned," he told reporters at a news conference in Warsaw Saturday, according to Reuters . But he cast the problem as a government-wide struggle to keep up technology and the fast-paced flow of information. "The advent of email and texts and smart phones is just generating enormous amounts of data," Obama said, which is "putting enormous pressure on the department to sort through it, classify it properly." In concluding the FBI's investigation into former Secretary...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today that it submitted a request for permission to depose former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; the Director of Office of Correspondence and Records of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-CRM”) Clarence Finney; and the former Director of Information Resource Management of the Executive Secretariat (“S/ES-IRM”) John Bentel. Today’s request arises in a Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit before U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan that seeks records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton. The lawsuit was reopened because of revelations about the...

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Loretta Lynch says the Hillary Clinton email investigation is being closed without any criminal charges. Lynch announced the Justice Department decision Wednesday, one day after FBI Director James Comey recommended against any prosecution.

The State Department on Tuesday issued a scathing condemnation of Israel’s plans to build new housing units in Maale Adumim and in Jerusalem. “If it’s true, this report would be the latest step in what seems to be a systematic process of land seizures, settlement expansions, and legalizations of outposts that is fundamentally undermining the prospects for a two-state solution,” said State Department spokesman John Kirby of the plans, which were announced Sunday following last week’s terrorist attacks against Israelis in Judea and Samaria. “We oppose steps like these, which we believe are counterproductive to the cause of peace. In...

Former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton is scheduled to meet Saturday with the FBI, a source close to the investigation into her private email server tells The Daily Caller. The source went on to suggest the interview may take place at her Washington, D.C. home. The bureau’s interview with the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is believed to be the final step in its investigation into the potential mishandling of classified information on Clinton’s private email server. Hundreds of now-classified documents — some of them “Top Secret” — were sent and received through Clinton’s private server, which she housed at her...

TEL AVIV – A U.S. government security officer serving at the U.S. Special Mission in Benghazi prior to the September 11, 2012 attacks, warned his superiors that lack of adequate security at the compound made serving there a “suicide mission.” The officer further predicted to his superiors “that there was a very good chance that everybody here was going to die.” In a devastating indictment, the officer stated that a superior told him “everybody back here in D.C. knows that people are going to die in Benghazi, and nobody cares and nobody is going to care until somebody does die.”...

The little people might get the wrong idea. I’ll give the Associated Press one cheer for doing this reporting, but only one because they really only care about misbehavior by Democrats when it inconveniences the media. Even so, if you want the champion among politicians of scrubbing all public records of anything the public might not like to see - I present to you, your inevitable Democrat nominee, Hillary Clinton:

Television cameras rolled when Hillary Clinton appeared on the central balcony of the New York Stock Exchange to ring the opening bell — just minutes after she attended a private breakfast in September 2009 with influential Wall Street and business leaders. But the identities of her breakfast guests would be left off of her official State Department calendar — omissions that are among scores of names and events missing from Clinton's historical record of her daily activities as secretary of state, an Associated Press review found. Now the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Clinton met that morning with a dozen chief...

... On Friday, Republicans leaked what they said was a quote from Rhodes: "We must make sure that the talking points reflect all agency equities, including those of the State Department, and we don't want to undermine the FBI investigation." But it turns out that in the actual email, Rhodes did not mention the State Department. It read: "We need to resolve this in a way that respects all of the relevant equities, particularly the investigation." Republicans also provided what they said was a quote from an email written by State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland. The Republican version quotes Nuland...

The AP review of Clinton's calendar — her after-the-fact, official chronology of the events of her four-year term — identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors and loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were either not recorded or listed with identifying details scrubbed. The AP found the omissions by comparing the 1,500-page document with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The names of at least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were missing from her calendar, the records show.

Some 50 State Department officials have signed a memo calling on President Obama to launch air and missile strikes on the Damascus regime of Bashar Assad. A "judicious use of stand-off and air weapons," they claim, "would undergird and drive a more focused and hard-nosed U.S.-led diplomatic process." In brief, to strengthen the hand of our diplomats and show we mean business, we should start bombing and killing Syrian soldiers. Yet Syria has not attacked us. And Congress has not declared war on Syria, or authorized an attack. Where do these State hawks think President Obama gets the authority to...

Protesting the Obama administration’s policy in Syria, dozens of State Department officers have signed an internal document calling on the administration to order targeted military strikes against Damascus to force regime change as the only way to defeat ISIS, the Wall Street Journal reports. The “dissent channel cable” was signed by 51 State Department officers involved with advising on Syria policy in various capacities, according to an official familiar with the document. The Wall Street Journal reviewed a copy of the cable, which repeatedly calls for “targeted military strikes” against the Syrian government in light of the near-collapse of the ceasefire...