Free Republic

From:simons@acm.org To: john.podesta@gmail.com Date: 2015-04-15 03:35 Subject: The Democracy Alliance meeting Dear John, I am following up on our very brief discussion, held as you were leaving the DA meeting, about Hillary Clinton's emails. I've included a summary of the issues and a precautionary step that I think should be taken. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. Regards, Barbara

On the day the news broke that Hillary Clinton had used a private email account as secretary of state, the man who would soon be named to chair her presidential campaign fired off a note of distress, venting frustration about some of Clinton’s closest aides. “Speaking of transparency, our friends Kendall, Cheryl and Phillipe sure weren’t forthcoming on the facts here,” John Podesta complained in the March 2015 note, referring to Clinton’s personal lawyer David Kendall as well as her former State Department staffers Cheryl Mills and Philippe Reines. “Why didn’t they get this stuff out like 18 months ago?...

Goldberg died of severe head trauma in an accident while exercising at a resort in the Mexican town of Punta Mita, a Mexican state official said Monday. He was found lying next to a treadmill Friday at the Four Seasons Resort Punta Mita, near Puerto Vallarta. ... Goldberg left his room at about 4 p.m. to exercise, and family members went to look for him after he didn't return, the Mexican official said. He was found at about 6:30 p.m. in one of the resort's gymnasiums lying by a treadmill in a pool of blood, with a blow to the...

Federal investigators probing the “flash crash” that briefly sliced nearly 1,000 points off the Dow Thursday are zeroing in on a series of “unusually high-volume” trades in S&P futures that originated in Chicago, a government official told POLITICO. Those trades set off a chain reaction of trades that caused the biggest drop within a single day in the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s storied history.

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...

The Obama administration official most likely in line to become the next U.S. envoy to the Coalition to Counter the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS or ISIL) has falsely presented himself as an official U.S. ambassador by the administration for the last five months, according to documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Brett McGurk, a deputy special presidential envoy to the Global Coalition who serves under General John Allen, was temporarily appointed by the administration as an ambassador on Oct. 18, 2014. He was conferred this rank through a little-known legal loophole that allows the administration to...

The terrorist who slit the throat of 85-year-old priest Fr. Jacques Hamel today in Normandy, France had previously been arrested on terrorism charges and was was sentenced to house arrest with an electronic monitor. He spent a year in prison after being arrested in Turkey attempting to reach Syria and join the Islamic State. He was granted unsupervised release periods from his parent's house between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. The attack occurred during the church's 9 a.m. Mass.The church attacked on Tuesday morning was reportedly on an ISIS list of potential targets discovered in April 2015....

Washington (AFP) - The US Justice Department said Friday it arrested an Islamic State sympathizer who was plotting to carry out a suicide bomb attack on a US military base in Kansas. John T. Booker Jr, 20, is charged with "attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction... attempting to damage property by means of an explosive and one count of attempting to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant," the Justice Department said. Booker was arrested earlier Friday near the Kansas city of Manhattan "as he made his final preparations for his planned assault"...

What does the State Department’s Wendy Sherman do with her spare time when not negotiating weak nuclear deals with rogue regimes? The same as the rest of the Obama foreign-policy team: threaten Israel with diplomatic isolation at the United Nations. Sherman issued some thinly veiled threats yesterday in remarks to a gathering of Reform movement leaders in which she made clear that the administration expects the next Israeli government to do its bidding with respect to supporting a two-state solution with the Palestinians. While there’s nothing new about this insistence, Sherman’s language followed the same pattern as other remarks issued...

Much of today's Morning Joe was devoted to a discussion of Rolling Stone's failed journalism on the UVa story. Maybe Mika Brzezinski should look in the mirror: she began her interview of Wendy Sherman, the chief US negotiator on the Iran deal, by offering her "congratulations." Even Sherman herself had the sense to suggest that congratulations were not yet in order. In contrast, Joe Scarborough actually tried to get Sherman to answer an important question: how much advance notice of inspections does the deal give Iran? Sherman skated away faster than Apolo Ohno, refusing to answer other than to claim...

ARUSHA, Tanzania, Feb.3 (Xinhua) -- The Chinese influence in Tanzanian soil is increasingly becoming big and bold. This can be seen after the Asian nation built two ultra-modern primary schools in Tanzania. The schools have been built in Tanzania's University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) and University of Dodoma (UDOM) campuses. China built the two schools under the Sino-Africa Friendship Primary Schools Project worth 3.23 million U.S. dollars. The schools are fully furnished with all modern teaching and learning facilities, and students enrolled in those schools will have chance of learning Chinese language and culture from Standard One to Standard...

You're a TV show host, and your guest has just suggested he'd like to "do something" to a sitting US senator such that he doesn't even want to describe it on air. Think you might challenge him about it? Not if you're Ed Schultz. On this evening's Ed Show, renegade "Republican" Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell and a big supporter of President Obama's Iran deal, was complaining about Democrats who have questioned the deal. According to Wilkerson, the problem is people who are too "enamored about the State of Israel." Singling out Chuck Schumer, Wilkerson said...

In a book just released, The Story: A Reporter's Journey, Judith Miller, a key witness in the Libby prosecution, states that Patrick Fitzgerald had offered repeatedly to drop all charges against Lewis Libby if he would "deliver" Vice President Cheney to him. In addition, she charges that Fitzgerald manipulated her into incorrectly testifying about a critical conversation she had with Libby and withheld exculpatory evidence from both her and the defense in order to induce her mistaken testimony – testimony the prosecution knew was made because she was acting under a false belief....[must read snip]....Rizzo, of course, is focused only...

The White House has appointed pro-Muslim Brotherhood Robert Malley as a new special assistant to President Barack Obama. As if this is not bad enough, Malley is in charge to cover the whole kitten caboodle: The Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region. This appointment happens to be at the same time that Erdogan of Turkey and Qatar had a millstone breakthrough in reviving the Muslim Brotherhood by gaining special provisions for the Islamist organization in Saudi Arabia and the Arab gulf. Malley, who now works as Senior Director of National Security Council of the White House (NSC) on...

<p>U.S. and Qatari officials began talks Wednesday about extending security assurances for five senior Taliban members who were released from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and whose transfer to Qatar triggered an outcry on Capitol Hill.</p> <p>The talks could lead to an extension of at least some aspects of a one-year arrangement that required Qatar to keep the former prisoners under supervision and ban them from leaving. They could also lead to the former detainees being transferred to another country, according to individuals familiar with the discussions. The agreement expires at the end of May.</p>

Destroyed warehouses allegedly stockpiled weapons purchased by Iran for Hamas An Israeli air force jet allegedly bombed warehouses in Libya placed in a small airfield in the south of the country, according to Arab media citing unnamed Libyan security sources. According to the reports, the warehouses, which were completely destroyed, stockpiled weaponry purchased by Iran from Africa and were intended to be smuggled to Hamas in Gaza.

When Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist, took a fatal overdose of Tylenol in 2008, the government declared that he had been responsible for the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, which killed five people and set off a nationwide panic, and closed the case. Now, a former senior F.B.I. agent who ran the anthrax investigation for four years says that the bureau gathered “a staggering amount of exculpatory evidence” regarding Dr. Ivins that remains secret. The former agent, Richard L. Lambert, who spent 24 years at the F.B.I., says he believes it is possible that Dr. Ivins was the anthrax...

The Secret Service leaked sensitive personal information to the press about Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz as the Utah Republican was investigating the beleaguered agency, an inspector general's report said Wednesday. The Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General issued a report on Wednesday that accused Secret Service Assistant Director Edward Lowery and other agency officials of plotting to leak information about Chaffetz, including his unsuccessful attempt to join the organization. The leaks were a highly unusual breach of decorum. Lawmakers often battle with agencies, but the fights mostly stay above board and focus on...

An assistant director of the Secret Service urged that unflattering information the agency had in its files about a congressman critical of the service should be made public, according to a government watchdog report released Wednesday. “Some information that he might find embarrassing needs to get out,” Assistant Director Edward Lowery wrote in an e-mail to a fellow director on March 31, commenting on an internal file that was being widely circulated inside the service. “Just to be fair.” Two days later, a news Web site reported that Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, had applied...

Judicial Watch today released newly obtained Department of State documents showing a nearly five-month total gap in the emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton decided to return to the State Department late last year. The documents also show that one key State Department official did not want a written record of issues about the Clinton emails. The documents also raise new questions about the accuracy of representations made to Judicial Watch, the courts, Congress, and the public by the Obama administration and Clinton. The documents were produced under court order in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit Judicial...