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The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal emails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency email address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says. “This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008. The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov...

A former Inspector General for the State Department says Hillary Clinton will never be indicted for her use of a private email server because there are four loyal Democrats standing in the way. Former Inspector General Howard J. Krongard says the current FBI investigation should be focused on how material made it from the classified email system, known as SIPRNet, to Clinton's unclassified private server. "It can't just jump from one system to the other. Someone had to move it, copy it. The question is who did that?" Krongard tells the New York Post. Krongard says Hillary's top three aides-Cheryl...

Howard Krongard worked his last day at the State Department recently, having learned a hard lesson in the ways of modern Congressional "oversight." To wit, if you don't follow Henry Waxman's orders, he'll try to ruin you. Comfortable after four successful decades in private life, Mr. Krongard thought he'd do a turn in public service by taking a job in 2005 as State's Inspector General, a supposedly "independent" role. Little did the political rookie realize that Congressional barons like Mr. Waxman think that the IGs work for them. In July, Mr. Krongard testified before Mr. Waxman's House oversight committee about...

"I am not my brother's keeper," Howard "Cookie" Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, testified to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee yesterday. As Cookie surely must know, that excuse hasn't worked since Genesis. But it was a fitting contribution to the modern-day Cain-and-Abel tale that unfolded before lawmakers' eyes in the Rayburn Building. In this case, the players weren't Cain and Abel, but Cookie and his brother Buzzy. Biblical scholars believe the first fratricide was committed with an ass's jawbone, but the weapon in this case was a uniquely Washington cudgel: the conflict of interest. Cookie, under fire...

A U.S. congressional oversight committee accused the State Department's inspector general on Friday of threatening to fire several of his staff if they cooperated with an investigation into his conduct. In a letter to Inspector General Howard Krongard, Rep. Henry Waxman accused Krongard for the second time in 10 days of interfering with a probe by the House of Representatives oversight committee the California Democrat chairs. The panel is looking into whether Krongard, who acts as an independent internal investigator for the State Department, failed to examine claims of government waste, fraud and abuse in Iraq and elsewhere so as...

Howard J. Krongard, the State Department's inspector general, has repeatedly thwarted investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and censored reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform charged yesterday in a 13-page letter. The letter, addressed to Krongard and signed by the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who released it yesterday, said the allegations were based on the testimony of seven current and former officials on Krongard's staff, including two former senior officials who allowed their...

The son and daughter-in-law of State Department Inspector General Howard J. Krongard have asked a judge to issue a restraining order forcing him to stop sending "unprofessional and highly offensive" e-mails that suggested the family would be put "on the street" if they lost a lawsuit Krongard has filed against them, according to documents filed last week in a New Jersey court. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating whether Krongard, a lawyer who was general counsel of Deloitte and Touche, thwarted politically embarrassing inquiries into contractor fraud and treated subordinates poorly. A letter to Krongard last...

Was Plame Covert? A Review of Isikoff and Corn's HubrisBy Fedora I recently finished reviewing Michael Isikoff and David Corn’s Hubris (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006) to see what it adds to the current state of knowledge in the Plamegate investigation. Here I will present my findings in the form of a list of questions and answers: 1. What did Valerie Wilson aka Valerie Plame do at CIA?According to Isikoff and Corn (12-13, 283-286), after Plame graduated from the CIA’s training program, she began working with the CIA Directorate of Operations’ European Division in the Cyrus/Greece/Turkey area in the late...

FTW, December 6, 2001 -- On October 9th, FTW broke a story on insider trading connected to the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center that sparked worldwide controversy. In that story we reported how the Israeli Herzliyya Institute for Counterterrorism had documented that unknown individuals -- with accurate foreknowledge of the attacks -- had purchased an obvious and unusually large number of "put" options on United and American Airlines shortly before the attacks. Additional companies hit hard by the insider trading included Axa Re(insurance) and Munich Re as well as American investment giants Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Put ...

Latest Spin: OK If bin Laden Lives The latest spin from the intellectual elites is that not capturing or killing Osama bin Laden is a good thing. One person who believes that the world may be better off if Osama bin Laden remains at large is the Central Intelligence Agency's recently departed executive director, AB "Buzzy" Krongard. Krongard may have good reason to feel that way. The New York Times reported last week that an internal CIA report found that the CIA leadership was grossly negligent for their activities leading up to Sept. 11, 2001. The Times said the CIA...

THE world may be better off if Osama Bin Laden remains at large, according to the Central Intelligence Agency’s recently departed executive director. If the world’s most wanted terrorist is captured or killed, a power struggle among his Al-Qaeda subordinates may trigger a wave of terror attacks, said AB “Buzzy” Krongard, who stepped down six weeks ago as the CIA’s third most senior executive. “You can make the argument that we’re better off with him (at large),” Krongard said. “Because if something happens to Bin Laden, you might find a lot of people vying for his position and demonstrating how...

‘Anonymous’ resigns from CIA * Says will now serve the national interest by talking publicly about Bin Laden and 9/11-Commission Report WASHINGTON: A CIA analyst who wrote a book criticising the US war on terror resigned from the spy agency after it banned him from publicly discussing his views, his publicist said on Thursday. Michael Scheuer wrote the book “Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror” under the pen name “anonymous” and formally resigned from the intelligence agency on Friday, after 22 years of service. In a statement to the press, Scheuer said that he blamed...