It looks like Benghazi is not dead yet. According to this story a Federal Judge, Amit Mehta, has ordered the State Department to continue looking for emails related to the Benghazi terrorist attack and possible cover up. Here is more:
A federal judge has ordered the State Department to search for any additional Benghazi-related emails then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have sent or received from aides Huma Abedin, Cheryl Mills or Jake Sullivan at their state.gov addresses.
Judge Amit Mehta, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, ruled that the State Department should search the state.gov emails as well, noting “this matter is a far cry from a typical FOIA case. Secretary Clinton used a private email server, located in her home, to transmit and receive work-related communications during her tenure as secretary of state.”The judge has ordered a status report by September 22.
Donald Trump says he will not fire Robert Mueller
Ever since Robert Mueller was named special prosecutor in the Russian hacking/collusion scandal there has been speculation that Donald Trump would fire him. Of course there has been no basis for this speculation: it has come from Trump supporters who want to see Mueller fired, the mainstream media in an effort to drum up controversy, and Democratic Party members hoping to egg him into doing it by threatening Donald Trump with consequences if he does.
Today Donald Trump put the speculation to rest, here is more:
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s job leading the probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election is safe, President Donald Trump said Thursday.
“I haven’t given it any thought,” Trump told reporters from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, when he was asked if he might fire Mueller as he did FBI Director James Comey earlier this year.
He then corrected himself on Mueller, acknowledging that he’s “been reading about it from you people.”
“You say, ‘Oh, I’m going to dismiss him.’ No, I’m not dismissing anybody,” Trump said. “I mean, I want them to get on with the task. But I also want the Senate and the House to come out with their findings.”
Donald Trump is right when he says that Robert Mueller has “been reading about it from you people.” The President has not even hinted at firing Robert Mueller and yet the attempt to create a story where no story existed was too tempting for many people to ignore.
The fact of the matter is, as I see it, Donald Trump cannot fire Robert Mueller and have any hope of passing his agenda. He already faces long odds with the Democrats united as the party of no and with establishment Republicans opposing him more vigorously than they ever opposed Barack Obama, if he did fire Robert Mueller those long odds would fall all the way to zero and I think he realizes this.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
The FBI raided Paul Manafort’s home in late July
As everyone is aware of by now we learned earlier today that at the end of July the FBI raided Paul Manafort’s home and seized documents. Here is more:
FBI agents raided the residence of former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort last month, and he also has turned over hundreds of pages of documents to congressional investigators, as probes ramp up into the president’s campaign and Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
The pre-dawn raid on July 26 at the Alexandria, Virginia, home roused Manafort, who was in town to appear before Congress, according to a person familiar with the situation. Agents took reams of material from his home.
“FBI agents executed a search warrant at one of Mr. Manafort’s residences. Mr. Manafort has consistently cooperated with law enforcement and other serious inquiries and did so on this occasion as well,” said Jason Maloni, a spokesman for the former Trump campaign chairman.
It should be remembered that Paul Manafort’s tenure as Donald Trump’s campaign manager was short-lived and once the news broke of his connections to former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of Regions Donald Trump accepted his resignation.
I believe Paul Manafort is in some real trouble here and I have to believe if Donald Trump knew about this connection he never would have hired him in the first place but still the question is out there.
Is there a smoking gun here? We do not know at this point but it seems like this is Paul Manafort’s problem, however if there is anything there it will be very problematic for the President:
A Washington-based defense lawyer with a client caught in the Russia probe said Mueller may also want to turn Manafort into a cooperative witness, something the former campaign manager’s representatives had previously said wasn’t happening.
“Manafort is on many levels a key subject of the investigation and someone who might be leveraged to share information about others,” the white-collar attorney said.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
The Obama White House was involved in emails about the Clinton/Lynch tarmac meeting spin
Last week, through a FOIA request, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) reported that the Department of Justice and the media were colluding over reporting the now infamous Clinton/Lynch tarmac meeting during the 2016 election. The same emails which gave us this revelation also proved that the FBI lied during the original FOIA request when James Comey claimed there were no FBI emails related to the tarmac meeting.
Now the ACLJ is reporting these newly released emails show the Obama White House was included in the email chain discussing how to spin this meeting. Here is more:
Our federal lawsuit against the DOJ bureaucracy over the secret meeting between former Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton has already unearthed documents proving the FBI lied that it had “no” documents, that the media was colluding with the Obama DOJ to bury the story, and that AG Lynch (AKA Elizabeth Carlisle) was using a secret email address to conduct official business. Now we’ve uncovered that the White House was involved.
On the afternoon of June 29, 2016, two days after the Clinton-Lynch meeting, senior DOJ officials forwarded an email containing a transcript of AG Lynch’s press availability where she answered questions about the meeting directly to the Assistant Press Secretary and Spokeswoman at the Obama White House, Brandi Hoffine, that stated, “I’ve attached a document containing the transcript to this email, and I’ve included the text below. Please let me know if there is anything that needs to be corrected.”
Nineteen minutes later, the same senior DOJ official, Melanie Newman – the person who had taken point on the DOJ spin team – emailed the FBI to “flag” the story about the meeting – an email the Comey-led FBI told us last October didn’t exist. This email included the now redacted talking points – key spin the Obama deep state still doesn’t want the public to see.
She specifically asked the White House if anything needed to be changed. That is interesting because when asked about the investigation in 2016 Josh Earnest had this to say:
“I think the bottom line is simply that both the president and the attorney general understand how important it is for the Department of Justice to conduct investigations that are free of political interference,”
Move along, nothing so see here…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
We all understand that college can be stressful on students. According to this story a professor at the University of Georgia has come up with a unique way to help his students cope with the stress of getting a bad grade–the student simply tells the professor what their grade should have been and he will change it without question. Here is more:
A University of Georgia professor has adopted a “stress reduction policy” that will allow students to select their own grades if they “feel unduly stressed” by the ones they earned.
According to online course syllabi for two of Dr. Richard Watson’s fall business courses, he has introduced the policy because “emotional reactions to stressful situations can have profound consequences for all involved.”
As such, if students feel “unduly stressed by a grade for any assessable material or the overall course,” they can “email the instructor indicating what grade [they] think is appropriate, and it will be so changed” with “no explanation” being required.
Okay, it is quite clear how this will help a student reduce stress but I fail to see how this will help the student in the long run. This is not teaching the student anything other than he or she has no responsibility for learning what the professor is teaching.
Perhaps the professor believes the mere shock of the initial bad grade will be enough to stir the student to try harder the next time around but how will this be an incentive to work harder when the student realizes they can be lazy and still get whatever grade they want?
The professor even admits this policy will hinder a student’s development:
Watson, notably, does concede that “while this policy might hinder the development of group skills and mastery of the class material,” those outcomes are ultimately a student’s “responsibility,”
Of course the final grade is ultimately the student’s responsibility because they are responsible for picking the grade! What happens when the student passes with high honors, gets a job based on these fake grades, and is ultimately fired when their employer realizes they do not know anything? Who will help relieve the stress then? I guess that is when the “professional cuddling expert” will be called in.
All this is doing is pushing the stress down the road and making it harder for students to adapt to the real world when they leave this institute of “higher learning.”
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Sunday, August 6th open thread: ‘Welcome to the Masquerade’
Here is the open thread for Sunday, August 6th. Please feel free to post links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues arise during the course of the day. Nothing is off-topic here.
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Here is Thousand Foot Krutch performing “Welcome to the Masquerade” live from 2011:
frui diem
This story is interesting indeed! It appears as if on at least one occasion former Attorney General Loretta Lynch used an alias when communicating with the department of Justice. Here is more:
On Friday internet sleuth Kim Dotcom dropped a bomb on Twitter.
Kim posted an email Friday showing Loretta Lynch using an alias to contact DOJ officials.
One email shows Loretta Lynch hiding her identity from Department of Justice officials.
Here is the email in question:
It certainly looks that way to me, the question is why? I think we know the answer…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Newly released FBI emails show collusion between the Department of Justice and the media over Clinton/Lynch tarmac meeting
The American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) has been trying to get documents from the FBI via FOIA request in relation to the Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton airport tarmac meeting during the 2016 election.
Back in July James Comey said no such documents exist but apparently that was a lie because according to this story the ACLJ has just received hundreds of pages of documents just the other day, several of them being emails related to the tarmac meeting.
We have just obtained hundreds of pages in our ongoing investigation and federal lawsuit on former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s tarmac meeting with former President Bill Clinton while the Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI had an ongoing criminal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. The results are shocking.
First, the Comey FBI lied to us. Last July, we sent FOIA requests to both the Comey FBI and the Lynch DOJ asking for any documents related to the Clinton Lynch plane meeting. The FBI, under the then directorship of James Comey, replied that “No records responsive to your request were located.”
The documents we received today from the Department of Justice include several emails from the FBI to DOJ officials concerning the meeting.
In addition to James Comey being a liar the emails also point out the collusion that occurred between the Department of Justice and the mainstream media:
there is clear evidence that the main stream media was colluding with the DOJ to bury the story. A Washington Post reporter, speaking of the Clinton Lynch meeting story, said, “I’m hoping I can put it to rest .” The same Washington Post reporter, interacting with the DOJ spin team, implemented specific DOJ requests to change his story to make the Attorney General appear in a more favorable light. A New York Times reporter apologetically told the Obama DOJ that he was being “pressed into service” to have to cover the story. As the story was breaking, DOJ press officials stated, “I also talked to the ABC producer, who noted that they aren’t interested, even if Fox runs with it.”
Two days after the meeting, DOJ officials in a chain of emails that includes emails to Attorney General Lynch herself stated that the media coverage of the meeting “looks like all or most are FOX” and that “CBS . . . just says a few lines about the meeting.”
Is it any wonder why people no longer trust the mainstream media?
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Debbie Wasserman Schultz claims the laptop she threatened the Capitol Police Chief over was Imran Awan’s and not hers
Debbie Wasserman Schultz has come under scrutiny since one of her aides, Imran Awan, was arrested on bank fraud charges. Bank fraud is just the beginning, there is much more because Imran and his brothers were accused of illegally accessing government computers during the 2016 election and the Congress is in the process of opening up an investigation into this potential scandal.
The Awan brothers made hundreds of thousands of dollars while working for the Democrats and they are now accused of gaining access to the emails of every single member of the Congress and selling the information.
This is where the story gets very interesting: although the brothers were banned from accessing the government network in the wake of the scandal Debbie Wasserman Schultz continued to employ Imran as her IT specialist and back in May she threatened the Capitol Police Chief with “consequences” if a laptop being held in this investigation was not returned.
It was assumed that the “member’s property” she was talking about while threatening the Police Chief was her laptop but now she is claiming the laptop in question actually belongs to Imran Awan, here is more:
Former Obama aide Ben Rhodes emerges as a person of interest in the unmasking scandal
As I write every time I do a story on the unmasking scandal, this is one of the aspects of the Russia investigation which has not received the media attention it deserves and it is for obvious reasons–several members of Donald Trump’s campaign team were unmasked during the 2016 election and this does not fit the Trump/Russia collusion narrative so it has been ignored.
According to this story Ben Rhodes, a former aide to Barack Obama and National Security Adviser is now a person of interest in this scandal.
Here is more:
Former Obama White House National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes is now emerging as a person of interest in the House Intelligence Committee’s unmasking investigation, according to a letter sent Tuesday by the committee to the National Security Agency (NSA). This adds Rhodes to the growing list of top Obama government officials who may have improperly unmasked Americans in communications intercepted overseas by the NSA, Circa has confirmed.
The House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, R-CA, sent the letter to the National Security Agency requesting the number of unmaskings made by Rhodes from Jan. 1, 2016 to Jan. 20, 2017, according to congressional sources who spoke with Circa. Rhodes, who worked closely with former National Security Adviser Susan Rice and was a former deputy national security adviser for strategic communications for President Obama, became a focus of the committee during its review of classified information to assess whether laws were broken regarding NSA intercepted communications of President Trump, members of his administration and other Americans before and after the election, according to congressional officials. The committee is requesting that the NSA deliver the information on Rhodes by August, 21.
And now it turns out that hundreds of unmasking requests were made during the 2016 election:
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