Lock all 3 of these POS’s up. Hell yes they are hypocrites.
The Justice Department’s inspector general said the department suffered from “systemic” problems regarding sexual harassment complaints over the last five years, according to a Washington Post report that peculiarly failed to mention former President Barack Obama or Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.
The DOJ requires “high level action” to solve the issue, which includes mishandling or ignoring complaints of sexual misconduct, according to the IG’s report. Over the last five years, the number of sexual misconduct allegations has increased and includes “senior Justice Department officials across the country,” according to WaPo.
Despite the issue increasing in severity during Obama’s second term, Washington Post reporter Sari Horwitz declined to mention senior administration officials, even though the “most troubling allegations” according to the IG, happened under their watch.
One woman, who was allegedly the victim of repeated groping and “sexually charged comments” became so distressed by her harasser that she “was terrified I was going to get in the elevator and he would be in there.”
On top of complete negligence in the handling of the complaint, the DOJ allowed “potential criminal assault violations,” according to the IG report. Despite these serious allegations, the IG’s office “found no evidence in the case file that a referral was made to the [Inspector General] or any other law enforcement entity.”
Theodore Atkinson, who worked in the DOJ as an attorney in the Office of Immigration Litigation under Holder according to his LinkedIn, admitted to stalking a female coworker, hacking into her personal email account and constructing a “fictitious online profile to entice her,” the IG wrote. For his behavior, Atkinson simply received a “written reprimand and reduction in title,” with no suspension or pay cut.
Atkinson was, however, recently given a “Special Commendation Award from the Civil Division.”
The WaPo investigation describes a number of other incidents that were reported but ultimately ended with no serious reprimands, including one sexual harassment case brought against a female top prosecutor in Oregon.
“Sexual harassment and misconduct is one of the very important areas we have to focus on and take seriously because of all the reasons the public is seeing now,” the IG said. “People’s attitudes have to change. Our interest is shining light on this kind of activity.”
Superficially, Lynch appeared to make gender and sexual harassment issues a top priority. In 2015, Lynch announced $2.7 million in grants to “strengthen the Justice System’s Response to Sexual Assault,” a DOJ press release stated at the time.
“The Department of Justice is committed to doing everything it can to help prevent, investigate and prosecute these horrendous crimes – including working to ensure that our greatest partners in this effort, the state and local law enforcement officers on whom we all rely, have the tools, training and resources they need to fairly and effectively address allegations of sexual assault and domestic violence,” Lynch said.
That same year, Lynch’s department issued new guidelines “to help law enforcement agencies prevent gender bias in their response to sexual assault and domestic violence, highlighting the need for clear policies, robust training and responsive accountability systems,” a press release reads.
GOP preps contempt resolution for top FBI, DOJ officials after missed Monday deadline
The House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday will begin writing a resolution holding top FBI officials in contempt of Congress after the agency missed a Monday deadline to turn over key evidence the committee has been seeking for months.
“We are moving forward with the contempt resolution,” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner Tuesday morning. He added that the panel is still negotiating with FBI and Justice Department officials to get the requested documents.
Nunes has accused the FBI and Department of Justice of a “months-long pattern … of stonewalling and obstructing this committee’s oversight work.”
Those accusations boiled over during the weekend, after stories were leaked to the New York Times and Washington Post saying that FBI agent Peter Strzok, a key investigator in the Trump-Russian probe, was removed from the Russia probe after exchanging text messages critical of Trump to another FBI agent he was involved with romantically. Republicans had been seeking information about why he was removed, but were never told anything by FBI or Justice Department directly.
Nunes had also been seeking information about the FBI and Justice Department’s use of the Steele dossier, which contains damning but unverified information about President Trump.
But the Strzok leak was the last straw, and Nunes announced Saturday he has ordered committee staff to begin drafting a contempt of Congress citation for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and for FBI Director Christopher Wray unless they complied with the panels’ requests for information by the close of business on Monday.
After the story broke, Nunes said, the FBI and Justice Department agreed to make some of the witnesses available, but are still withholding many documents and other evidence the Intelligence panel is seeking, an aide said.
Justice Department spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said the department has given the panel hundreds of pages of classified documents and multiple briefings, and has now allowed Strzok and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to meet with the panel.
While committee aides will start writing the contempt resolution Tuesday, Nunes has not set a date for the panel to consider the contempt charges.
If approved by the committee, the resolutions of contempt would be sent to the House floor for consideration, but only if Speaker Paul Ryan chooses to bring them up. One GOP source said Ryan supports the contempt resolution.
Contempt of Congress resolutions approved by the House are referred to the the Justice Department, but they are relatively rare.
The House voted in 2012 to hold then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress for withholding documents sought by the House Oversight Committee on the DOJ’s “Fast and Furious” operation that resulted in thousands of U.S. guns ending up in the hands of Mexican drug dealers.
These resolutions also are not always effective. For example, the Justice Department elected not to prosecute Holder over the contempt charge.
According to a new report from The Hill, early drafts of former FBI Director James Comey’s statement on Hillary Clinton’s email case accused the former Secretary of State of “gross negligence” in her handling of classified information as opposed to the “extremely careless” phrase that made its way into the final statement.
As The Hill further points out, the change in language is significant since federal law states that “gross negligence” in handling the nation’s intelligence can be punished criminally with prison time or fines whereas “extreme carelessness” has no such legal definition and/or ramifications.
An early draft of former FBI Director James Comey’s statement closing out the Hillary Clinton email case accused the former Secretary of State of having been ‘grossly negligent” in handling classified information, new memos to Congress show.
The tough language was changed to the much softer accusation that Clinton had been “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information when Comey announced in July 2016 there would be no charges against her.
The draft, written weeks before the announcement of no charges, was described by multiple sources who saw the document both before and after it was sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee this past weekend.
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that Secretary Clinton, and others, used the email server in a manner that was grossly negligent with respect to the handling of classified information,” reads the statement, one of Comey’s earliest drafts.
Those sources said the draft statement was subsequently changed in red-line edits to conclude that the handling of 110 emails containing classified information that were transmitted by Clinton and her aides over her insecure personal email server was “extremely careless.”
Of course, Comey’s final statement, while critical of Hillary’s email usage, alleged that no prosecutor would pursue charges against actions which he described only as “extremely careless.”
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of the classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
“There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position or in the position of those with whom she was corresponding about the matters should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”
Meanwhile, Section 793 of federal law states that “gross negligence” with respect to the handling of national defense documents is punishable by a fine and up to 10 years in prison…so you can see why that might present a problem for Hillary.
“Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer— shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
Unfortunately, The Hill’s sources couldn’t confirm the most important detail behind this bombshell new revelation, namely who made the call to the change the language…
The sources, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media, said the memos show that at least three top FBI officials were involved in helping Comey fashion and edit the statement, including Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, General Counsel James Baker and Chief of Staff Jim Rybicki.
The documents turned over to Congress do not indicate who recommended the key wording changes, the sources said. The Senate Judiciary Committee is likely to demand the FBI identify who made the changes and why, the sources said.
…that said, we’re going to go out on a limb and question whether it just might have had something to do with that infamous meeting between Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Comey’s boss, that happened just 6 days before Comey made his statement?
In the latest development surrounding last week’s announcement by Devin Nunes, according to which President Trump and his associates were incidentally swept up in foreign surveillance by American spy agencies, the NYT reports that the pair of White House officials who played a role in providing Nunes with the intelligence reports behind his claim, have been identified.
The NYT has outed the Nunes sources, who it claims are Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the White House Counsel’s Office and formerly worked on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee.
As reported previously, Nunes had refused to identify his sources, saying he needed to protect them so others would feel safe coming to the committee with sensitive information. He first disclosed the existence of the intelligence reports on March 22, and in his public comments he has described his sources as whistle-blowers trying to expose wrongdoing at great risk to themselves.
Amusingly, the NYT adds that “the officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the intelligence, and to avoid angering Mr. Cohen-Watnick and Mr. Ellis.”
In other words, the US has devolved to the point where one set of anonymous sources is doxxing another set of anonymous sources in the pursuit of a political agenda.
Cohen-Watnick is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser. The officials said that earlier this month, shortly after Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter about being wiretapped on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.
President Donald Trump reportedly overruled a decision by National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster in order to keep a Jewish National Security Council aide in his current position. Trump overruled the decision on Sunday after Cohen-Watnick, 30, appealed to White House advisers Stephen Bannon and Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, Politico reported
McMaster had told Ezra Cohen-Watnick, senior director for intelligence programs at the NSC, that he would be moved to a different position at the NSC after CIA officials had pushed for his ouster, according to Politico.
A Washington consultant told Politico that Cohen-Watnick and Flynn “saw eye to eye about the failings of the CIA human intelligence operations,” and that the “CIA saw him as a threat, so they tried to unseat him and replace him with an agency loyalist.
Additionally, the NYT adds, that the intel reports consisted primarily of ambassadors and other foreign officials talking about how they were trying to develop contacts within Mr. Trump’s family and inner circle in advance of his inauguration.
Cohen-Watnick has allegedly been reviewing the reports from his fourth-floor office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where the National Security Counsel is based.
Perhaps more importantly, the NYT sources say the description of the intelligence is in line with Mr. Nunes’s own characterization of the material, which he has said was not related to the Russia investigations when he first disclosed its existence in a hastily arranged news conference on March 22.
It was not immediately clear if now that the identity of the Nunes sources has been revealed, whether Nunes will make the contents of the confidential documents public.
New questions were raised Thursday about whether FBI Director James Comey will be able to keep his job after the Justice Department’s internal watchdog opened an investigation into his handling of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server.
The investigation by the department’s inspector general will examine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to follow appropriate procedures and improperly released information about the Clinton probe — renewing scrutiny of one of the most contested developments of the 2016 election campaign.
Public pronouncements by Comey at different points last year drew denunciations from Donald Trump, who will become president next week, and from Hillary Clinton, who has blamed her defeat in part on Comey’s statements.
“What Comey did, commenting on an investigation, was totally improper,” said Nick Akerman, a partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney LLP and a former federal prosecutor. “There is no need to have an inspector general investigation to justify the president firing him.”
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a statement Thursday that his investigation will examine actions leading up to Comey’s decision to announce findings of his probe on July 5, when he said that Clinton and her top aides were “extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” but that no criminal prosecution should be pursued.
He said it also includes a review of actions surrounding Comey’s later announcements that he was reopening and then again closing the probe, both made days before the Nov. 8 election. Democrats say those moves damaged Clinton’s candidacy at a crucial moment and helped hand the presidency to Trump.
Comey’s Reaction
Comey is in his fourth year of a 10-year term and can be removed only if he resigns or is fired by the president. There are no signs he intends to resign and only one FBI chief in the bureau’s history — William Sessions in 1993 — has ever been fired.
In a statement Thursday, Comey said he’s “grateful to the Department of Justice’s IG for taking on this review,” adding that “everyone will benefit from thoughtful evaluation and transparency regarding this matter.”
Earlier in the week, the 56-year-old FBI chief told the Senate Intelligence Committee that “I hope I’ve demonstrated by now I’m tone-deaf when it comes to politics, and that’s the way it should be.”
Long before the Clinton probe, Comey had earned a reputation for independent action. As acting attorney general under President George W. Bush, he led efforts to oppose a classified warrantless eavesdropping program whose legality the Justice Department questioned, putting him in direct conflict with the White House.
Apple Hack
Earlier last year, Comey tried to force Apple Inc. to hack into an iPhone used by a dead terrorist, saying that was law enforcement’s only option. The move was denounced in Silicon Valley and by privacy advocates, and the bureau later dropped the case after it bought a tool that helped it get access to the phone.
But that criticism paled in comparison to what Comey endured after offending Republicans and Democrats in turn during last year’s highly polarized presidential campaign. His initial conclusion that Clinton and her aides shouldn’t face charges drew condemnation from Trump and other Republicans, who said the probe had been politicized.
“FBI director said Crooked Hillary compromised our national security. No charges. Wow! #RiggedSystem,” Trump said in a tweet at the time.
But Comey’s surprise October announcement that he would reopen the investigation based on new and potentially relevant evidence drew praise from Trump and infuriated Democrats. It even drew a rebuke from President Barack Obama, who told NowThis News that “I do think that there is a norm, that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo, we don’t operate on incomplete information, we don’t operate on leaks.”
Trump saw it differently, saying “I have great respect that the FBI and Department of Justice have the courage to right the horrible mistake that they made. This was a grave miscarriage of justice that the American people fully understood.”
The president-elect’s transition team didn’t respond to requests for comment on the inspector general’s latest announcement.
‘Glaring and Egregious’
Former Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon called the new investigation “entirely appropriate and very necessary but also not surprising.”
“The deviations from the protocols at the FBI and the Justice department were so glaring and egregious,” Fallon said in an interview on MSNBC. Were it not for Comey’s letter just before the election, Clinton would be president, Fallon said.
Horowitz said there will also be an examination of whether FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe should have recused himself from participating in the Clinton e-mail investigation because of his wife’s Democratic connections. And investigators also will look at whether other non-public information was improperly released during the campaign.
The inspector general’s decision came following requests “from numerous chairmen and ranking members of congressional oversight committees, various organizations, and members of the public,” according to the statement.
Policy Violation
It wasn’t immediately clear who would be in charge of responding to recommendations made by the inspector general, which will come after Trump takes office. His nominee to head the Justice Department, Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions, appears likely to be confirmed by the Senate as the next attorney general.
However, Sessions said during his confirmation this week that he would recuse himself from any matters related to any Clinton investigation because of disparaging comments he made about Clinton during the campaign.
Nevertheless, the internal investigation could ultimately help restore confidence in the Justice Department and FBI, both of which had their reputations heavily damaged by the way the Clinton investigation was handled. Some critics, including several lawmakers, have said Comey should have resigned over how the probe and the public announcements were handled.
Attorney General Loretta Lynch and other senior department officials told Comey at the time not to send his letter to lawmakers on Oct. 28 announcing that the Clinton investigation was being reopened. They argued that doing so violated long-standing policy to not undertake anything significant with a major investigation so close to an election if, by doing so, it could affect the results.
Tarmac Meeting
Comey proceeded anyway — writing to lawmakers about a fresh trove of e-mails possibly tied to Clinton that he said needed to be reviewed. But the handling of the probe had already been assailed by that point, after Lynch met privately with Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac in late June. Lynch said she and the former president discussed only personal issues, such as their grandchildren, but the private meeting quickly became a pivotal, controversial event in the investigation’s timeline.
The Justice Department watchdog investigation will include a review of allegations that the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs improperly disclosed non-public information to the Clinton campaign, and whether he should have been recused from participating in certain matters.
It also will review whether the FBI’s decision to release certain Freedom of Information Act documents on Oct. 30 and Nov. 1 via a Twitter account was influenced by improper considerations. Those postings, which touched on Bill Clinton’s controversial 2001 pardoning of a wealthy donor, and documents related to an FBI file on Trump’s late father, fueled further confusion and criticism about management at the bureau.
The Department of Justice declined a FBI request to open up a public integrity investigation into the Clinton Foundation, CNN reported on Wednesday.
According to the news network, the FBI made the request earlier this year, but the DOJ said it did not have enough evidence to open a formal probe. CNN reported:
The Clinton Foundation was not part of the recent investigation into her private server; it was separate. The FBI went to Justice Department earlier this year asking for it to open a case into the foundation, but the public integrity unit declined. The Justice Department had looked into whether it should open a case on the foundation a year prior and found it didn’t have sufficient evidence to do so.
Opposition to the FBI’s request — if the report is accurate — is likely to raise even more questions about whether the DOJ is acting impartially. Attorney General Loretta Lynch came under fire last month after it was revealed that she met in secret on her government airplane with Bill Clinton in late June.
Look at the shoes. Poor damn shoes.
The meeting occurred days before the FBI and DOJ were set to interview Hillary Clinton as part of its investigation into whether Clinton or her aides mishandled classified information by using a private email system.
Lynch has insisted that she did not discuss the investigation with the former president. It has also been reported that the Clinton campaign has considered asking Lynch to remain as attorney general if Hillary Clinton is elected president.
The CNN report helps settle a question that government officials have largely avoided addressing.
FBI Director James Comey declined last month to say whether an investigation into the Clinton Foundation was underway.
Clinton’s campaign spokesman Brian Fallon recently said that there is “no evidence” that the Clinton Foundation is or was under investigation.
Though the DOJ decided not to pursue a public integrity investigation, new questions about the Clinton Foundation were raised on Tuesday after the watchdog group Judicial Watch released a new set of emails showing that a top adviser for the non-profit asked Clinton’s State Department aides to help out several individuals — including a major Clinton Foundation and a close associate. (RELATED: Clinton Foundation Official Asked Hillary’s State Dept. For Favors For Donor, Associate)
The Clinton Foundation official was Doug Band. He has worked for Bill Clinton for years and now runs the consulting firm Teneo Strategies.
In an April 25, 2009 email, Band asked Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to help put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department’s “substance person” on issues related to Lebanon.
Chagoury, a longtime Clinton donor who was once a close associate of Nigerian dictator Sani Abache, has given between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2009 he pledged $1 billion to help with a project undertaken by the Clinton Global Initiative, a Clinton Foundation offshoot which Band helped advise.
“This is very important,” Band said in his request to Mills and Abedin. “He’s key guy there and to us.”
In another April 2009 email, Band forwarded an email to Mills, Abedin and another Clinton aide, Nora Toiv, entitled “A favor.”
The individual seemingly asked for a job with the State Department.
“Important to take care of [redacted],” Band wrote.
On April 29, 2009, Band emailed the same trio of advisers asking: “Can someone pls call [redacted]? He calls me every day and we owe him some attention.”
It is unclear who the individual was, but Abedin told Band that she would place the call. Band’s remark that “we owe him some attention” suggests that the functions of the Clinton Foundation overlapped with the State Department.
Abedin and Toiv later landed a job at Band’s firm, Teneo.
The Clinton campaign denied to CNN that the Band emails were evidence of collusion between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s State Department.
“Neither of these emails involve the secretary or relate to the Foundation’s work,” Clinton campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin told the network. “They are communications between her aides and the President’s personal aide, and indeed the recommendation was for one of the Secretary’s former staffers who was not employed by the Foundation.”
Notably, Schwerin’s comment does not address Band’s request on behalf of Chagoury, the major Clinton Foundation donor.
