An associate of Arizona Sen. John McCain is invoking his Fifth Amendment rights in order to avoid revealing information to Congress about the Steele dossier.
David J. Kramer, a former State Department official, pleaded the fifth in response to a subpoena issued in December by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Fox News reported.
In a Dec. 19 interview with the committee, Kramer said that he had information about some of the sources of information in the dossier, which was written by former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Kramer learned the information in Nov. 2016, after traveling to London to meet with Steele. Kramer and McCain, a Republican, first learned of the dossier earlier that month after meeting with an associate of Steele’s.
After the London meeting, Steele provided a copy of the dossier to Kramer with instructions to share it with McCain. The senator then provided a copy of the document to then-FBI Director James Comey during a Dec. 9, 2016, meeting.
The House Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena on Dec. 27 to compel Kramer to discuss the dossier’s sources.
Kramer, who was a director at the McCain Institute and now works for Florida International University, has avoided speaking publicly about his handling of the dossier. There has also been widespread speculation that he is BuzzFeed’s source for the document. The website published the dossier on Jan. 10, 2017.
In addition to his interview with the Intelligence Committee, Kramer was deposed in December as part of a lawsuit filed against BuzzFeed for publishing the dossier. Kramer’s lawyers have requested that his deposition in that case be sealed.
Steele, McCain and Fusion GPS, the firm that hired Steele to write the dossier, have all denied being BuzzFeed’s source. Kramer is the only person known to have handled the completed dossier who has not denied providing it to BuzzFeed.
Kramer and his attorney have not responded to numerous requests for comment.
McCain Associate Who Handled Dossier Asks Judge To Seal Deposition
An associate of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s who handled the dossier is asking a federal judge to block the release of a videotape and transcript of a deposition he recently gave in a lawsuit related to the salacious document.
David Kramer, a former State Department official and former director at the McCain Institute for International Leadership, filed a motion in federal court in Florida asking a judge for a protective order to block the public release of his deposition.
Kramer was deposed last month by lawyers for a Russian businessman suing BuzzFeed News for publishing the dossier. The lawyers for the businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, are interested in Kramer because he is one of just a few people known to have handled the dossier after it was completed by former British spy Christopher Steele and before its Jan. 10, 2017 publication.
Gubarev’s attorneys want to find out whether BuzzFeed’s source gave any warnings about the veracity of the dossier and whether it was verified or unverified.
Steele, McCain and Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier on behalf of Democrats, have all denied being BuzzFeed’s source.
Kramer has not commented publicly on the issue.
Kramer’s lawyer, Marcos Jiminez, argued in a motion to seal that the release of the deposition would jeopardize his personal safety, make him subject to hounding from the press, and conflict with congressional investigations looking into the dossier.
Kramer was interviewed by the House Intelligence Committee last month and has also met with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Mr. Kramer seeks to prevent the Plaintiffs from sharing his videotaped deposition and accompanying transcript beyond the instant litigation,” wrote Jiminez.
He asserted that Kramer’s deposition in the BuzzFeed lawsuit “would reveal the extent of the Congressional Committees’ knowledge regarding the information provided by Mr. Kramer in closed-door sessions.”
Jimenez also argues that should Kramer’s deposition be released to the public, he “will be hounded by the press.”
Kramer and McCain first learned of the dossier shortly after the 2016 election while attending the Halifax International Security Forum. On the sidelines of that event, Kramer and McCain had a conversation with Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Russia and associate of Steele’s.
Kramer then traveled to London to meet with Steele. While there, the pair made arrangements for Kramer to obtain the dossier back in the U.S. and to provide a copy to McCain.
McCain shared an incomplete version of the dossier with then-FBI Director James Comey on Dec. 9, 2016. The Republican was unaware at the time that Comey and the FBI were already aware of Steele’s report. FBI agents met with the ex-spy multiple times prior to the election.
Steele published his final dossier memo on Dec. 13, 2016. It is that document which alleges that Gubarev used two of his web-hosting companies to hack into the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems prior to the election. The dossier also alleges that Gubarev was recruited under duress by Russia’s spy services. He denies all of the allegations. In addition to suing BuzzFeed, he is suing Steele in London, where the former spy is based.
In court filings there, Steele has acknowledged that the Dec. 13 memo contained unverified information.
As of the beginning of this month, Steele and Fusion GPS have dodged requests for depositions from Gubarev’s lawyers.
David Kramer Motion to Seal deposition in BuzzFeed lawsuit by Chuck Ross on Scribd
Fire this Globalist metrosexual fraud. This is pure nepotism.
The White House said Jared Kushner will not be affected by any policy changes made regarding security clearances, even though he still has an interim security clearance 13 months into the job.
“Nothing that has taken place will affect the valuable work that Jared is doing,” Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said at the White House briefing on Tuesday.
Chief of Staff John Kelly last week ordered changes to how the White House manages security clearance investigations, after staffer Rob Porter continued to access top secret material even after claims of domestic abuse by two ex-wives were reported to the FBI.
Porter had been working under an interim security clearance, raising scrutiny over the 30 to 40 White House staffers who are also working with interim security clearances, including the president’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.
The new policy limits new interim clearances to a maximum of 270 days, and cuts off any Top Secret or Sensitive-Compartmented-Information (TS/SCI) level interim clearances for individuals whose investigations or adjudications have been pending since June 1, 2017, or before.
That new policy would presumably affect Kushner, who currently holds an interim TS/SCI security clearance that has been pending since he joined the White House more than a year ago. Kushner has reportedly requested more intelligence information than almost every other White House official outside of the National Security Council. He is allowed to see the nation’s most-guarded intelligence, and access the presidential daily briefing.
On Monday, CNN reported that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s interest in Kushner had expanded beyond his Russian contacts, into meetings during the transition period with foreign investors to shore up financing for a building backed by his family’s firm.
Sanders batted down repeated questions from reporters over Kushner’s security clearance, given his many powerful roles in the administration and the sensitivity of some of his tasks, on everything from working on the Middle East Peace Process to modernizing the federal government’s use of technology.
“I”m not aware of any red flags,” Sanders said.
Trump critics have questioned Kushner’s access to the nation’s most secured intelligence despite his lack of a permanent security clearance for months. Last week, left-wing watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics filed a complaint, calling on the White House to revoke Kushner’s interim clearance.
California Democrat Rep. Ted Lieu has questioned Kushner’s lack of a clearance on a near-weekly basis:
Ted Lieu
✔
@tedlieu
Today is #PresidentsDay2018. That means we all need to ask again: Why does son-in-law of @POTUS still have a security clearance?
Also, did Kushner cause White House to initially turn against Qatar because they rejected his demand to finance the troubled loan at 666 Fifth Ave?
Last week, National Background Investigations Bureau Director Charles Phalen toldlawmakers that he had “never seen that level of mistakes” when asked about Kushner’s security clearance application.
Kushner has revised his security clearance questionnaire multiple times, to include meetings with foreign officials.
Some have also questioned whether Porter was allowed to remain in the job for so long due to his connection with Kushner. Porter attended Harvard with Kushner, according to multiple reports.
This Muslim woman tried to burn the school down and join Al-Qaida. But the FBI let her go.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — After Tnuza Jamal Hassan was stopped from flying to Afghanistan last September, she allegedly told FBI agents that she wanted to join al-Qaida and marry a fighter, and that she might even wear a suicide belt.
She also said she was angry at U.S. military actions overseas and admitted that she tried to encourage others to “join the jihad in fighting,” but she said she had no intention of carrying out an attack on U.S. soil, according to prosecutors. Despite her alleged admissions, she was allowed to go free.
Four months later, the 19-year-old was arrested for allegedly setting small fires on her former college campus in St. Paul in what prosecutors say was a self-proclaimed act of jihad. No one was hurt by the Jan. 17 fires at St. Catherine University, but her case raises questions about why she wasn’t arrested after speaking to the agents months earlier and shows the difficulty the authorities face in identifying real threats.
“She confessed to wanting to join al-Qaida and took action to do it by traveling overseas. Unless there are other circumstances that I’m not aware of, I would have expected that she would’ve been arrested,” said Jeffrey Ringel, a former FBI agent and Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor who now works for a private security firm, the Soufan Group, and isn’t involved in Hassan’s case. “I think she would’ve met the elements of a crime.”
Authorities aren’t talking about the case and it’s not clear how closely Hassan was monitored before the fires, if at all. When asked if law enforcement should have intervened earlier, FBI spokesman Jeff Van Nest and U.S. Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Tasha Zerna both said they couldn’t discuss the case.
Counterterrorism experts, though, say it seems she wasn’t watched closely after the FBI interview, as she disappeared for days before the fires. But the public record in a case doesn’t always reveal what agents and prosecutors were doing behind the scenes.
Authorities are often second-guessed when someone on their radar carries out a violent act. Some cases, including Wednesday’s mass shooting at a Florida high school that killed 17 people, reveal missed signs of trouble. The FBI has admitted it made a mistake by failing to investigate a warning last month that the suspect, Nikolas Cruz, could be plotting an attack.
U.S. officials were also warned about Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev two years before his 2013 attack, though a review found it was impossible to know if anything could’ve been done differently to prevent it. And the FBI extensively investigated Omar Mateen, the gunman in the June 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. As part of an internal audit, then-FBI Director James Comey reviewed the case and determined it was handled well.
Hassan, who was born in the U.S., has pleaded not guilty to federal counts of attempting to provide material support to al-Qaida, lying to the FBI and arson. She also faces a state arson charge. One fire was set in a dormitory that has a day care where 33 children were present.
Although her attempts to set fires largely failed, Hassan told investigators she had expected the buildings to burn down and “she hoped people would get killed,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Winter said in court. He added that she was “self-radicalized” and became more stringent in her beliefs and focused on jihad.
Hassan’s attorney, Robert Sicoli, declined to talk about whether the family saw warnings. Her mother and sister declined to speak to The Associated Press.
According to prosecutors, Hassan tried to travel to Afghanistan on Sept. 19, making it as far as Dubai, United Arab Emirates, before she was stopped because she lacked a visa.
Prosecutors say that when the agents interviewed Hassan on Sept. 22, she admitted she tried to join al-Qaida, saying she thought she’d probably get married, but not fight. When pressed, she allegedly told investigators she guessed she would carry out a suicide bombing if she had to do it but she wouldn’t do anything in the U.S. because she didn’t know whom to target.
Hassan admitted that she wrote a letter to her roommates in March encouraging the women to “join the jihad in fighting,” prosecutors allege. The letter was initially reported to campus security, and it’s unclear when it was given to the FBI or if the agency made contact with Hassan before the September interview.
It’s also unknown how closely U.S. authorities were monitoring Hassan between the interview and Dec. 29, when she was barred from traveling to Ethiopia with her mother. Prosecutors say at the time, Hassan had her sister’s identification and her luggage contained a coat and boots, which she wouldn’t have needed in Ethiopia’s warm climate.
Hassan later ran away from home and her family reported her missing Jan. 10. Her whereabouts were unknown until the Jan. 17 fires.
Ron Hosko, a retired assistant director of the FBI’s criminal division who has no link to Hassan’s case, said that based on an AP reporter’s description of it, “I would certainly look at this person, not knowing more, as somebody who would be of interest to the FBI.” However he cautioned that the public doesn’t know the extent of the agency’s efforts to monitor Hassan, including whether she was under surveillance, what sort of background investigation was done and how agents might have assessed her capacity to follow through on a threat. He also said the FBI might have made decisions based on her mental capacity.
“Not every subject requires 24/7 FBI surveillance,” he said. The reality is that hard decisions on resources are being made constantly, with the biggest perceived threats receiving the most attention.
“I’m sure there are plenty of days where they hope they are right and they are keeping their fingers crossed,” he added.
Stephen Vladeck, professor of law at the University of Texas, said monitoring possible threats is a delicate balance, and law enforcement can’t trample civil rights while trying to prevent violence.
“This is a circle that can’t be squared,” he said. “We are never going to keep tabs on every single person who might one day pose a threat.”
I will not hold my breath on anyone in the Obama Administration going to jail.
Friday on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham gave her take on the indictments handed down by special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe regarding interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Ingraham told viewers the indictments illustrated how Russia was still a threat to the United States despite then-President Barack Obama’s dismissal during the 2012 presidential election. She also said Mueller should interview 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State John Kerry, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes and former President Barack Obama as part of his investigation.
Partial transcript as follows:
INGRAHAM: We finally have indictments in the Mueller investigation related to meddling in the 2016 election and the only ones being charged are Russians. A federal grand jury has now indicted 13 Russian individuals and companies for interfering in the 2016 election.
They are charged with a bunch of things like creating fake ads, staging pro and anti-Trump campaign events and also setting up bogus-run organizations, but they’re not accused of rigging the election for Trump, but instead of waging information warfare to sow discord in the political system.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced the indictments and added this important caveat.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
ROD ROSENSTEIN, DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL: There is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charge conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Did you hear that? No American knowingly took part in the meddling and the plot had no effect on the outcome of the election. The facts, as we know them right now, support the president’s argument, an argument we have been making on this show for months, that there was no Russian collusion.
Trump took a bit of a victory lap, tweeting today, “Russia started their anti-U.S. campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for president. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong. No collusion.”
Well, it certainly looks that way, but we don’t know for sure what else Mueller may have up his sleeve. Though, I’ll tell you who this totally vindicates. Conservatives and Republicans who have been warning people for years about how devious the Russians can be in this situation.
Remember, when President Obama sarcastically mocked Mitt Romney’s Russia warning back in 2012 during the presidential debate.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
FORMER PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: When you’re asked what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia. Not al Qaeda, you said Russia. In the 1980s or now, calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the cold war has been over for 20 years.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: Now, Obama was so convinced of that, his DOJ and FBI did next to nothing about the Russian skulduggery. I love that word. His State Department actually approved the visas for the Russian operatives that were indicted by Mueller today.
His FBI began spying on Trump Campaign Advisor Carter Page with a FISA warrant in the fall of 2016. Now details in today’s indictment do point to vindication for the Trump team. This is Jonathan Turley from tonight’s “Special Report.”
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONATHAN TURLEY: This makes more sense than the narratives that everyone has been throwing around in conspiracies. This began in 2014, began before the presidential election. The Russians were taking targets of opportunity and shooting at everybody in the election but certainly working more against Hillary Clinton. But what it does show is that they did a really quite impressive job in finding this cyber trail to these individuals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
INGRAHAM: I’ll say. And the indictment describes rallies that took place after the election, both in support of and against Trump, and by the way, some of them happened on the same day, all allegedly promoted by these Russian accounts.
You see this ad? Well, according to “Buzzfeed,” this anti-Trump rallies staged just four days after the election was promoted by something called “Black Matters U.S.,” a social media campaign thought to be organized by Russians.
So, why would Trump collude with Russians to stage anti-Trump rallies? Does that make any sense? Here’s the bottom line. The Trump campaign did not know about Russian interference in the election. But the Obama administration certainly did and may have in fact enabled it.
Given that we already know Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid for that fake Russian dossier, it’s time for the special counsel to interview Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, and maybe even Barack Obama. I say it’s high time that we determine who really colluded with the Russians.
Left-wingers at Google are engaged in a relentless effort to demonetize Breitbart News from its AdSense platform and are linking advertising clients to the anti-Breitbart, far-left pressure group Sleeping Giants.
Previously, Google employees have contacted Breitbart News to reveal an atmosphere of indoctrination and intimidation, driven by leftist zealots at the company.
Current and former employees at Google now tell us that those same zealots are trying to use the company’s immense power against Breitbart News. In addition to placing pressure on management to take action against the site, they are also working to undermine Breitbart’s reputation with advertisers.
Breitbart News has obtained a screenshot (withheld to protect our source) that shows Google ad account manager Aidan Wilks advising another company – a client of Google’s – that advertising on Breitbart may impact their “brand safety.”
In the screenshot, Wilks can be seen linking Google’s client to the website of Sleeping Giants, a far-left organization that has repeatedly targeted Breitbart and other conservative-leaning news sites with false claims of racism and bigotry.
The screenshot also shows Matthew Rivard, another employee at Google, advising colleagues that Wilks’ message was a “nice template” for those who wished to “call out” the issue to clients. Rivard recommends that the message should be repeated for “other key accounts.”
Until April 2017, Rivard held the position of head of industry for performance advertising at Google. This made Rivard one of the go-to people for Google’s advertising clients. Rivard’s Linkedin page currently lists him as head of industry for branded apparel and e-commerce.
Harmeet Dhillon, the Republican national committeewoman for the California GOP and attorney for James Damore, who has also seen the screenshot, said that other Google AdSense users should be concerned about secret blacklisting.
“This communication from Google’s advertising department raises troubling questions about whether the company’s ideological bias extends beyond the employment claims covered in our lawsuit, to Google’s business practices toward AdWords publisher users as well,” said Dhillon.
“If there are indeed concerted efforts at Google to undermine the advertising revenue of disfavored publishers (an allegation YouTube is already facing in court through its abrupt demonetization of Prager University videos), then this conduct may give rise to additional legal claims. At a minimum, AdSense users may question whether they are being targeted for secret blacklisting as described here.”
Open Letter
According to multiple sources, leftist employees sent an open letter to Google’s management calling on them to demonetize Breitbart, which amassed over seven hundred supporters across the company. Conservatives at Google launched a counter-petition, which attracted over two hundred supporters.
Breitbart News has seen a copy of the anti-Breitbart letter, confirming its existence. The letter called for the removal of Breitbart from AdSense, and for the “blocking of all Google-served ads” on Breitbart.com.
The open letter accuses Breitbart of “hate speech”:
Googlers hold a diverse set of political, social, and economic perspectives, but respect and openness bind us together. The hate & bullying Breitbart incites toward Muslims , LGBTQ people , and women is incompatible with those shared values.
Among the authors of the open letter was Google employee Jeff Lakusta, who runs the technical support team behind the company’s ad buying platform.
The other authors were comms employee William Fitzgerald, senior software engineer Pierre Fite-Georgel, and the now-former employee Tim Chevalier, who Breitbart News exposed as a supporter of political violence and the “Antifa” domestic terroristorganization. Support for Antifa is widespread at Google, who have so far refused to issue a statement to us condemning political violence.
Although Google’s management did not cave in to the open letter, leftists have reportedly not stopped their efforts to demonetize Breitbart. According to one source, anti-Breitbart employees at the company are “literally keeping a spreadsheet” about the site.
“They have people trawling each article on the site [Breitbart] to see if they can find comments that might violate their policies in order to justify not trafficking ads.”
Fake News Panic
Another former Google employee spoke of an all-hands meeting at Google’s Mountain View headquarters in May, in which senior management stated that “for the last 6 months” they had been “committed to solving the fake news problem.”
This insider found the poorly-concealed political bias amusing.
“Hmmm, what happened 6 months [from May] to cause Google to suddenly become focused on fake news?”
May, of course, was exactly 6 months from the election of Donald Trump.
The people who are running Google’s “fake news” detection algorithms are “strongly biased,” claims one other source.
This bias revealed itself recently, in Google’s botched attempt to place “fact-check” messages next to “disputed” stories from news outlets.
The feature was abruptly canceled after a Daily Caller report revealed that it almost exclusively targeted conservative news sites, including Breitbart News, often by incorrectly attributing claims to their stories.
We are losing money because of loopholes which is legal. Why not let them bring the money back and pay the same taxes they are paying overseas.
This article was first published in June of 2014
More than 70 percent of Fortune 500 companies maintain subsidiaries in offshore tax havens, according to a new report by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group Education Fund and Citizens for Tax Justice.
The consumer groups say tax loopholes in the U.S. encourage the companies to use the tax havens. Together, the report says, the companies sent $2 trillion offshore for tax purposes in 2013.
Exploitation of the loopholes is perfectly legal. But it results in a giant loss of federal tax revenue each year, according to the report. Fifty-five companies disclose the amount they would expect to pay in U.S. taxes if they didn’t report profits offshore for tax purposes: a total of $147.5 billion, “equal to the entire state budgets of California, Virginia, and Indiana combined,” says the report. “The average tax rate the 55 companies currently pay to other countries on this income is a mere 6.7 percent, implying that most of it is booked to tax havens.”
The conservative Tax Foundation attacked the report saying that it cherry-picks a small sample of the Fortune 500 corporations, 55 of them, producing unreliable results. According to the Foundation, in general, corporations actually paid an effective rate of about 27 percent on their foreign income. A spokesman said the report provides “a misleading picture of the tax burden corporations pay overseas.”
Co-author of the report, Dan Smith of U.S. PIRG Education Fund, disagrees.
“Our tax code is broken, and it’s hurting the public. We simply shouldn’t allow companies that use American roads, and benefit from America’s education system and large consumer market, to take a free ride at the expense of the rest of us,” says Smith.
Findings in the report include:
Nike: $6.7 billion booked offshore, on which it would otherwise owe $2.2 billion in U.S. taxes. “That means they pay a mere 2.2 percent tax rate on those offshore profits, suggesting nearly all of the money is held by subsidiaries in tax havens,” reads the report.
Pfizer: $69 billion in profits booked offshore, the third highest among the Fortune 500. “The world’s largest drug maker, operates 128 subsidiaries in tax havens,” according to the report.
The Tax Foundation pointed out “almost every country on the planet is a tax haven compared to the United States.” According to the foundation’s review of IRS data, “U.S. multinationals paid $128 billion in foreign income taxes on $470 billion in reported taxable income in 2010. This is an effective tax rate of 27.2 percent.”
