Republicans lawmakers report irregularities in the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server that suggest the bureau had evidence to believe the former Secretary of State and her staff broke federal laws.
Congressional investigators told The Hill they possess written statements indicating a belief by FBI agents that laws were broken Clinton and her aides transmitted classified information through her private email server.
Republicans on three House committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee have based their findings on recent interviews and document productions, including an analysis of the multiple drafts of former FBI director James Comey’s exoneration of Clinton.
Investigators on Capitol Hill said drafts of the statement acknowledged there was “evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information.”
The May 2, 2016 draft of Comey’s statement featured a passage that read:
“The sheer volume of information that was properly classified as Secret at the time it was discussed on email (that is, excluding the “up classified” emails) supports an inference that the participants were grossly negligent in their handling of that information.”
Comey’s final language mirrored that draft, when he said, “although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”
The FBI also confirmed that a key witness lied to the FBI during his interviews. The witness was the computer technician who deleted Clinton emails from her private server in 2015 after a congressional subpoena had been issued for them.
The technician’s admission came a year after making the false statement. He was never charged for lying to the FBI, a federal felony to which former Trump national security adviser Mike Flynn pleaded guilty.
The most jarring irregularity Republican lawmakers say they found was confirmation that the FBI began drafting an exoneration of Clinton before the former Secretary of State and other key witnesses were interviewed.
A senior law enforcement official who spoke under conditions of anonymity told The Hill, “the leadership had a sense of where the evidence was likely headed and the idea was they would begin drafting their conclusions and if we found anything that changed that sense we’d alert them.”
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, blasted the move.
“Making a conclusion before you interview key fact witnesses and the subject herself violates the very premise of good investigation. You don’t lock into a theory until you have the facts. Here the evidence that isn’t public yet shows they locked into the theory and then edited out the facts that contradicted it.”
Grassley’s staff also received a sworn affidavit from an FBI agent that contradicted claims by Comey. The former FBI director told Grassley the bureau investigated whether Clinton and her staff were guilty of unlawful destruction of government records.
The FBI agent in question stated the bureau did not address that issue.
These revelations cast further doubt on the objectivity of the FBI investigation that ultimately let Clinton off the hook.
These 2 Metro-sexual Punks Think They Can Tell Us About Climate Change.
As Christian Toto reports in Washington Times, all the movies with environmental themes flopped.
These included:
Bladerunner 2049, where eco-systems have collapsed – presumably because of man’s selfishness, greed, and refusal to amend his carbon-guzzling lifestyle – and food can now only be grown under hermetically sealed pods.
Stupid Liberals Think We Are Killing The Earth Because We Are Greedy And Selfish. This Coming From Dumb As Self-Centered, Drug Addicted Morons.
Mother!, where the Jennifer Lawrence character apparently symbolizes Mother Earth. According to the director Darren Aronofsky: “America is schizophrenic. We go from backing the Paris climate [accord] to eight months later pulling out. It’s tragic, but in many ways, we’ve revealed who the enemy is and now we can go attack it.”
They Want You To Believe That This Skank Jennifer Lawrence Is Mother Earth!
Geostorm, where the world is all but destroyed by the weather-controlling satellites which were designed to save it. (So: quite accurate, actually by Hollywood standards. A fine and plausible depiction of the unintended consequences of idiot, well-meaning scientists who think they have the power to ‘combat’ the natural process of ‘climate change’).
Liberals Have Been Saying That This Would Happen For Years And They Have Been Wrong.
Downsizing, where the eco-friendly Norwegians develop an ingenious way of coping with overpopulation: a ray which shrinks you to a fraction of your normal size, thus enabling humans to live more sustainably and deplete scarce resources at a much slower rate.
Matt Damon And These Perverts In Hollywood Want To Tell Us About Downsizing To Save The earth When They All Fly On Private Jets And Own Several Large Homes.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which opened at a measly four theaters in its first weekend and grossed $124,823.00.
Al Gore Needs His Ass Kick For Lying About Climate Change.
By its seventh week, it was doing so badly that even Captain Underpants: the Movie — released six weeks earlier — was outperforming it at the box office. Its takings were a fraction of its predecessor’s, An Inconvenient Truth.
Perhaps audiences had simply had enough of Gore’s scaremongering, as summed up in this scathing review in the Australian by Maurice Newman:
It continues the scaremongering of Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Like the first, it’s full of scary weather videos and features, Gore reminding us that we are at a tipping point with the result that our children will inherit a world of “stronger storms, worsening floods, deeper droughts, mega-fires, tropical diseases spreading through vulnerable populations in all parts of the Earth, melting ice caps flooding coastal cities, unsurvivable heat extremes, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees”. Facts don’t stand in the way of a good story. But, then, most who consider this movie a “must see” will take delight in having their fantasies and prejudices confirmed.
The movie shamelessly promotes green tech, a field in which Gore is a successful investor. His advocacy and political access are believed to have made him the world’s first “carbon billionaire”. But that’s the self-serving nature of climate-change politics. It confers wealth and privilege on its boosters. Doubters are banished.
The dire performance of these movies would seem to confirm what many of us have long suspected about the misplaced priorities of the liberals inside the Hollywood bubble.
They’ve deluded themselves that they’re in the consciousness-raising business. (Hence, e.g., the new woke Star Wars installment).
We still think they ought to be in the entertainment business.
Huma Abedin forwarded sensitive State Department emails, including passwords to government systems, to her personal Yahoo email account before every single Yahoo account was hacked, a Daily Caller News Foundation analysis of emails released as part of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch shows.
Abedin, the top aide to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, used her insecure personal email provider to conduct sensitive work. This guarantees that an account with high-level correspondence in Clinton’s State Department was impacted by one or more of a series of breaches — at least one of which was perpetrated by a “state-sponsored actor.”
The U.S. later charged Russian intelligence agent Igor Sushchin with hacking 500 million Yahoo email accounts. The initial hack occurred in 2014 and allowed his associates to access accounts into 2015 and 2016 by using forged cookies. Sushchin also worked for the Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital, which paid former President Bill Clinton $500,000 for a June 2010 speech in Moscow.
A separate hack in 2013 compromised three billion accounts across multiple Yahoo properties, and the culprit is still unclear. “All Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft,” the company said in a statement.
Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, regularly forwarded work emails to her personal humamabedin@yahoo.com address. “She would use these accounts if her (State) account was down or if she needed to print an email or document. Abedin further explained that it was difficult to print from the DoS system so she routinely forwarded emails to her non-DoS accounts so she could more easily print,” an FBI report says.
Abedin sent passwords for her government laptop to her Yahoo account on Aug. 24, 2009, an email released by the State Department in September 2017 shows.
Huma sends laptop password to Yahoo / Source: State Department
Long-time Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal sent Clinton an email in July 2009 with the subject line: “Important. Not for circulation. You only. Sid.” The message began “CONFIDENTIAL… Re: Moscow Summit.” Abedin forwarded the email to her Yahoo address, potentially making it visible to hackers.
The email was deemed too sensitive to release to the public and was redacted before being published pursuant to the Judicial Watch lawsuit. The released copy says “Classified by DAS/ A/GIS, DoS on 10/30/2015 Class: Confidential.” The unredacted portion reads: “I have heard authoritatively from Bill Drozdiak, who is in Berlin…. We should expect that the Germans and Russians will now cut their own separate deals on energy, regional security, etc.”
The three email accounts Abedin used were abedinh@state.gov, huma@clintonemail.com, and humamabedin@yahoo.com. Though the emails released by the State Department partially redact personal email addresses, the Yahoo emails are displayed as humamabedin[redacted].
Clinton forwarded Abedin an email titled “Ambassadors” in March 2009 from Denis McDonough, who served as foreign policy adviser to former President Barack Obama’s campaign and later as White House chief of staff. The email was heavily redacted before being released to the public.
Stuart Delery, chief of staff to the deputy attorney general, sent a draft memo titled “PA/PLO Memo” in May 2009, seemingly referring to two Palestinian groups. The content was withheld from the public with large letters spelling “Page Denied.” Abedin forwarded it to her Yahoo account.
Abedin routed sensitive information through Yahoo multiple times, such as notes on a call with the U.N. secretary-general, according to messages released under the lawsuit.
Contemporaneous news reports documented the security weaknesses of Yahoo while Abedin continued to use it. Credentials to 450,000 Yahoo accounts had been posted online, a July 2012 CNN article reported. Five days later, Abedin forwarded sensitive information to her personal Yahoo email.
Abedin received an email “with the subject ‘Re: your yahoo acct.’ Abedin did not recall the email and provided that despite the content of the email she was not sure that her email account had ever been compromised,” on Aug. 16, 2010, an FBI report says.
The FBI also asked her about sending other sensitive information to Yahoo. “Abedin was shown an email dated October 4, 2009 with the subject ‘Fwd: US interest in Pak Paper 10-04’ which Abedin received from [redacted] and then forwarded to her Yahoo email account…. At the time of the email, [redacted] worked for Richard Holbrooke who was the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (SRAP). Abedin was unaware of the classification of the document and stated that she did not make judgments on the classification of materials that she received,” the report said.
The U.S. charged Sushchin with hacking half a billion Yahoo accounts in March 2017, in one of the largest cyber-breaches in history, the Associated Press reported. Sushchin was an intelligence agent with Russia’s Federal Security Service — the successor to the KGB — and was also working as security director for Renaissance Capital, Russian media said.
“It is unknown to the grand jury whether [Renaissance] knew of his FSB affiliation,” the indictment says.
Renaissance Capital paid Bill Clinton $500,000 for a speech in 2010 that was attended by Russian officials and corporate leaders. The speech received a thank-you note from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Renaissance Capital is owned by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who also owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team. He unsuccessfully ran for Russian president against Putin in 2012.
Sushchin’s indictment says “the conspirators sought access to the Yahoo, Inc. email accounts of Russian journalists; Russian and U.S. government officials,” and others. Information about the accounts such as usernames and password challenge questions and answers were stolen for 500 million accounts, the indictment says. The indictment does not mention Abedin’s account.
A hacker called “Peace” claimed to be selling data from 200 million Yahoo users.
The user data also included people’s alternate email addresses, that were often work accounts tying a Yahoo user to an organization of interest. The hackers were able to generate “nonces” that allowed them to read emails “via external cookie minting” for some accounts.
The New York Times reported that in the 2013 hack, which affected all Yahoo accounts, “Digital thieves made off with names, birth dates, phone numbers and passwords of users that were encrypted with security that was easy to crack. The intruders also obtained the security questions and backup email addressed used to reset lost passwords — valuable information for someone trying to break into other accounts owned by the same user, and particularly useful to a hacker seeking to break into government computers around the world.”
Yahoo published a notification on Sept. 22, 2016, saying: “Yahoo has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor.”
Clinton downplayed the risks of her email use days later, saying it was simply a matter of convenience.
“After a year-long investigation, there is no evidence that anyone hacked the server I was using and there is no evidence that anyone can point to at all, anyone who says otherwise has no basis, that any classified materials ended up in the wrong hands. I take classified materials very seriously and always have,” Clinton said on Oct. 9, 2016, at the second presidential debate,
Abedin’s use of Yahoo email is consistent with the determination by the FBI that Clinton associates’ emails were, in fact, compromised. “We do assess that hostile actors gained access to the private email accounts of individuals with whom Secretary Clinton was in regular contact from her private account,” then-FBI director Jim Comey said in 2016.
It’s About Damn Time We Cut Off These Terrorist Sponsors
Trump: ‘No More’ Aid to Pakistan, ‘They Have Given Us Nothing but Lies and Deceit’
President Donald Trump lashed out at Pakistan on Twitter just a few minutes past 7:00 a.m. Eastern time on New Year’s Day, expressing frustration at Islamabad’s inadequate efforts against terrorism and implying that U.S. foreign aid will be terminated as a result.

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
The United States has foolishly given Pakistan more than 33 billion dollars in aid over the last 15 years, and they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help. No more!
7:12 AM – Jan 1, 2018
* 18,41018,410 Replies 34,74034,740 Retweets 93,20393,203 likes
Twitter Ads info and privacy
It is not yet clear whether the “no more” exclamation means the complete or partial termination, or temporary suspension, of American aid to Pakistan.
If the complete termination of U.S. foreign aid does indeed become official policy, it would be a far more dramatic step than withholding all or part of America’s $255 million in military assistance to Pakistan, a measure reportedly under consideration by the administration over the past few days after Pakistan refused to allow U.S. interrogators access to a captured terrorist from the hostage-taking Haqqani network.
In August, President Trump said the “next pillar” of his strategy for battling terrorism would involve a “change in our approach to Pakistan.”
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Trump accused Pakistan of giving “safe haven to agents of chaos, violence, and terror.”
“We can no longer be silent about Pakistan’s safe havens for terrorist organizations, the Taliban and other groups that pose a threat to the region and beyond,” the president said. ”These killers need to know they have nowhere to hide – that no place is beyond the reach of American arms.
The Trump administration withheld $50 million in military aid to Pakistan over the summer because it felt Islamabad was not doing enough to bring down the Taliban and the Haqqani Network. There was some criticism at the time that despite his strong complaints about Pakistan refusing to help fight the Taliban or even actively colluding with it, Trump was dealing more harshly with Egypt over human rights violations by its government.
The Pakistani military rescued a Canadian-American family held hostage for years by the Haqqanis in October. Concerns have been raised that even this rescue might have been the result of a deal between the Pakistanis and the militant network, which has long been suspected of enjoying special favors and protection from elements of the Pakistani security apparatus. The prisoner Pakistan refused to allow the United States to interview was tied to the kidnapping of this Canadian-American family.
On Thursday, Pakistani military spokesman Major-General Asif Ghafoor warned the United States against taking “unilateral” military action on its soil and denied his country was not doing enough to fight the Taliban and its allies, promising that the results of Pakistan’s counterterrorism operations would be “seen in subsequent years and months.”
After making this declaration, Ghafoor implied Pakistan could actually do more, once its concerns about Afghan refugees are addressed. “If there are any facilitators and abetters inside Pakistan that can only be addressed if the 2.7 million Afghan refugees are sent back to Afghanistan,” he said.
According to the federal government, for fiscal year 2012, “The United States remained the world’s largest bilateral donor, obligating approximately $48.4 billion—$31.2 billion in economic assistance and $17.2 billion in military assistance.” However, “obligated” funds are not the same as “dispersed.”
The U.S. disbursed $33.2 billion—$19 billion in economic assistance to 184 countries and $14.2 billion in military assistance to 142 countries. Out of the top six U.S. foreign aid recipients, five of them were Muslim countries. And yet it seems the U.S. can’t buy good press in the Middle East.
The UN boasts 193 members, and the U.S. provided economic assistance to 184 of them, or 96% of the countries in the world. To be sure, the amount of assistance drops significantly after the top 10 countries or so, but still.… Of course, State Department officials might claim that some of that money is to help the poor. But China has the second largest economy in the world—and is a major buyer of U.S. debt. So we borrow money from China in order to give them financial assistance?
Yes they want bonuses. ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?
A report entitled “Mapping the Swamp” describes a bureaucracy reportedly consisting of bloated paychecks and enormous incentives for government employees.
The report was published by OpenTheBooks.com, self-described with a mission to “post ‘Every dime, Online, In Real Time,’ of federal, state, and local government spending to provide transparency for smart government.” Open The Books is a function of American Transparency, a public charity that refuses government money and “[presents] hard data without policy recommendations,” in order to “enhanced public discourse with delineated facts.”
The cover of the report features quotes from both Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and President Ronald Reagan. It poses three essential questions: “Should the federal government reassess its payroll priorities?” Second, “is it necessary to maintain an expansive and costly bureaucracy?” Finally, “Does a large and widespread federal workforce facilitate good government?”
Inside, the report details the roughly $1 million per minute that taxpayers spend on the $136 billion in pay and benefits to federal workers — over $20.6 billion of which is contained within the Washington, DC “Beltway” alone. Recent years have reportedly seen a marked increase in large payouts, with 165% more federal employees making more than $200,000 a year, and 406,960 making at least $100,000. These findings prompted Open The Books to dub $100,000 the “minimum wage” for government employees.
The most-paid man in the federal government is reportedly a heart surgeon at the Department of Veterans Affairs who is bringing in $403,849 annually, while the largest bonus was reportedly $141,525 paid out to a human resources manager at Presidio Trust in San Francisco. The aforementioned surgeon makes more money than President Donald Trump himself. The average worker takes 10 holidays off, 13 sick days, and 20 vacations days — and up to two full months of vacation, after three years’ employment.
Federal employees are currently expected to receive a pay increase as part of an order signed by the POTUS.
He Is Completely Right! Investigate All Of The Bastards.
“At this point it seems the DOJ and FBI need to be investigating themselves,” Nunes wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Breitbart News.
Nunes said in the letter that several weeks ago the Justice Department informed the committee that basic investigatory documents (FBI Form FD-302s) subpoenaed on August 24 “did not exist.”
“However,” Nunes wrote, “shortly before my meeting with you in early December, DOJ subsequently located and produced numerous FD-302s pertaining to the Steele dossier, thereby rendering the initial response disingenuous at best.”
“As it turns out, not only did documents exist that were directly responsive to the Committee’s subpoenas, but they involved senior DOJ and FBI officials who were swiftly reassigned when their roles in matters under the Committee’s investigation were brought to light,” he said.
Nunes did not reference who those officials were, but it has been widely reported that senior FBI official Peter Strzok was removed from the special counsel and reassigned to human resources after Robert Mueller found he sent anti-Trump texts. Strzok had also played key roles in the Clinton email investigation and the FBI’s initial Russia probe.
Senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr was also removed from his position as associate deputy attorney general after it came to light that he had met with the author of the dossier as well as a co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind it. His wife, Nellie Ohr, was also found to have worked for Fusion GPS.
FBI General Counsel James Baker is also being reassigned at the FBI.
Nunes said, given the content and impact of these “supposedly newly-discovered” documents, the committee was no longer able to accept the Justice Department’s refusal to provide other requested documents — FBI Form FD-1023s that document meetings between FBI officials and FBI confidential human sources.
Nunes is now demanding that the DOJ and FBI hand over all requested documents no later than January 3, 2018.
Those documents, he said, include but are not limited to:
• All responsive FD-1023s, including all reports that summarize meetings between FBI confidential human sources and FBI officials pertaining to the Steele dossier;
• All responsive FD-302s not previously provided to the Committee; and
•In addition to the FD-302s and FD-1023s, certain responsive analytical and reference documents that were specifically identified and requested by the Committee, and supposedly subject to imminent production, as of December 15.
If DOJ withholds any relevant documents, it must provide a written legal justification from Rosenstein personally, Nunes wrote. He also requested dates in January 2018 for interviews with:
• Former DOJ Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr;
• FBI Supervisory Special Agent (SSA) Peter Strzok;
• FBI Attorney James Baker;
• FBI Attorney Lisa Page;
• FBI Attorney Sally Moyer; and
• FBI Assistant Director for Congressional Affairs Greg Brower.
Nunes also noted other outstanding requests:
The Committee further reminds you of these other outstanding requests for information:
• Details concerning an apparent April 2017 meeting with the media involving DOJ/FBI personnel, including DOJ Attorney Andrew Weissman (due December 13) and
• The remaining text messages between SSA Strzok and Ms. Page (due December 15).
“Unfortunately, DOJ/FBI’s intransigence with respect to the August 24 subpoenas is part of a broader pattern of behavior that can no longer be tolerated,” Nunes wrote.
Nunes has threatened to begin drawing up a resolution to hold Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray in contempt of Congress.
