Friday, June 03, 2016

5 Times Hillary Clinton Blatantly Lied About Her Emails By Tom Cahill

Source: http://usuncut.com/politics/5-times-hillary-clinton-lied-emails/
May 26, 2016

The State Department Inspector General’s report about Hillary Clinton’s emails and private server proves Clinton has been blatantly lying to the American people for over a year.

While Bernie Sanders, her only remaining primary opponent, has refused to touch the email issue, opting instead to debate policy, the former Secretary of State is expected to be questioned soon by the FBI as it finishes its investigation into whether or not Clinton’s use of a private email server in her home compromised national security.

Even if national security was never jeopardized, Clinton could still be indicted for “gross negligence” if the Department of Justice concludes that Clinton’s cavalier attitude about the sensitive materials in her server constitutes negligence. Even a former U.S. Attorney General has said the Clinton investigation should result in indictment, claiming she broke at least four different laws.

A Clinton indictment would almost certainly cost the former First Lady the Democratic nomination if it comes before the Democratic National Convention in late July, or even hand the presidency to Donald Trump if Clinton is the Democratic nominee and the FBI hands down an indictment between then and November. The release of the Inspector General’s report makes an indictment much more likely, as it proves Clinton has consistently lied to the public about the issue in at least five different instances:

Lie #1: The State Department signed off on Clinton’s use of a private server

At the 30-second mark of the below video, Clinton is seen telling NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in a 2015 interview that her private email server was “allowed by the State Department,” and again reiterating that same point in the October 2015 Democratic Debate on CNN.

However, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) wrote that Clinton not only ignored proper protocol for recordkeeping, but actively circumvented it by using a private home server to conduct State Department business:

“The Department’s current policy, implemented in 2005, is that normal day-to-day operations should be conducted on an authorized Automated Information System (AIS), which “has the proper level of security control to … ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the resident information.”

As of this writing, Clinton’s own website parrots the lie that the State Department allowed her to use a private server to conduct State Department business.

Lie #2: Other Secretaries of State did the same thing

In response to the OIG report, Hillary for America national press secretary Brian Fallon tweeted that Clinton’s use of a private server was “not unique,” and Clinton later said that her predecessors had similar recordkeeping practices (a claim PolitiFact debunked with a “mostly false” rating):

According to the New York Times, Albright and Rice didn’t use private email accounts to conduct government business. And while Clinton would like to use Colin Powell as an example of a predecessor who adopted similar recordkeeping practices, he used his private email sparingly, whereas Clinton used it exclusively. As Bloomberg View’s Megan McArdle wrote, Powell’s use of a private account was completely transparent. Clinton, on the other hand, told those asking about her private server to stop asking about it immediately.

Powell had an outside line set up in his office, into which he plugged a laptop, which he used alongside his State Department computer. The IT department was, in other words, aware that this was going on, and it seems to have come up in discussions of his drive to get everyone at State access to the Internet at their desk.

While former Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice agreed to be interviewed by the OIG for the report, Clinton did not.

Lie #3: Clinton’s private server was never hacked

44-year-old Romanian hacker Marcel Lehel Lazar, also known as Guccifer, claims that he not only successfully hacked into Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but that up to 10 hackers from multiple countries had access to the server at one point, and that hacking into the server was “easy.” In 2015, Politico reported that Clinton’s server had hacking attempts from South Korea, China, and Germany.

Guccifer recently pleaded guilty to hacking the social media and email accounts of approximately 100 senior government officials, including former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and is likely to do serious time on charges of unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft. Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon cast doubt on Guccifer’s claims, saying there’s no definitive proof that the server was ever hacked.

However, the OIG report reveals that Bryan Pagliano, who set up Clinton’s server, had to shut down the server at one point to prevent hackers from accessing its contents. And the New York Times reports that Clinton blatantly ignored multiple briefings and in-person training sessions on cybersecurity:

The department issued numerous warnings dating back a decade about the cybersecurity risks of using personal emails accounts for government business, the report said. Mrs. Clinton was personally sent a memo in 2011 warnings of hackers trying to target unclassified, personal email accounts. She was also given a classified, in-person briefing on the dangers, the report said.

Lie #4: Clinton and her staff cooperated with every step of the investigation

In a March interview with CBS’ Face the Nation, Clinton congratulated Bryan Pagliano for cooperating with the FBI investigation into the use of her private server, calling the investigation a “security review” and saying “everyone else has” cooperated with investigators along the way. But the OIG report reveals that neither Clinton nor her top aides, like Huma Abedin, Jake Sullivan, and Cheryl Mills, agreed to be interviewed for the report.

Additionally, the OIG found that not only was Team Clinton unwilling to cooperate, but that Clinton wasn’t alone in her use of private email for government business. The Washington Post discovered a section buried in the report that names “four immediate staff members” as having some 72,000 pages of government business archived in their private accounts:

emails1

And while Clinton eventually agreed to turn over tens of thousands of emails to the public as part of a Freedom of Information Act request, the OIG found that Clinton sent an incomplete package, with months of emails missing from Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State:

emails2

Lie #5: Clinton sent no classified material over her private server

On Hillary Clinton’s website, she defends her use of the private server, arguing that no classified emails were ever sent on her home server, claiming she only used her home account for unclassified material. But a Washington Post analysis of Clinton’s email records found that over 100 emails Clinton sent from her home server contained classified information:

In roughly three-quarters of those cases, officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified. Clinton sometimes initiated the conversations but more often replied to aides or other officials with brief reactions to ongoing discussions.

The analysis also showed that the practice of using non-secure email systems to send sensitive information was widespread at the department and elsewhere in government.

Additionally, 22 of the emails on Clinton’s server, amounting to seven email chains and 37 pages of hard copy, were later given “top secret” classification by the State Department, meaning they could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to national security if made public. Brian Fallon blasted the categorization of those emails, calling it “overclassification run amok.” At one point, Clinton even instructed aide Jake Sullivan to strip a set of talking points of its classified status, and then send the document through a “non-secure” channel after Sullivan told his superior that there were “issues” with sending the document through a secure fax line.

Certainly, the OIG report leaves many questions unanswered, as the Democratic presidential front-runner has now been caught lying in at least five public statements about her emails. The only questions remaining now are whether or not the FBI will question the former Secretary of State before the Democratic National Convention in July, and whether or not she’ll be charged with a crime.

 

Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact him via email at tom.v.cahill@gmail.com

#NeverClinton

I’m Voting Trump, Warts and All: I stand by all my criticisms of the New Yorker, but the stakes for the country are too great to elect Clinton. By Bobby Jindal

Source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/im-voting-trump-warts-and-all-1462739009

May 8, 2016

Some of my fellow Republicans have declared they will never, under any circumstances, vote for Donald Trump. They are pessimistic about the party’s chances in November and seem more motivated by long-term considerations. They think devotion to the “anybody but Trump” movement is a principled and courageous stance that will help preserve a remnant of the conservative movement and its credibility, which can then serve as a foundation for renewal.

I sympathize with this perspective, but I am planning to vote for Donald Trump. Why? Because the stakes for my country, not merely my party, are simply too high.

I was one of the earliest and loudest critics of Mr. Trump. I mocked his appearance, demeanor, ideology and ego in the strongest language I have ever used to publicly criticize anyone in politics. I worked harder than most, with little apparent effect, to stop his ascendancy. I have not experienced a sudden epiphany and am not here to detail an evolution in my perspective.

I believe this presidential election cycle favors Republicans, due more to President Obama’s shortcomings than to any of our virtues or cleverness. I also believe that Donald Trump will have the hardest time of any of the Republican candidates in winning. He has stubbornly stuck to the same outlandish behavior and tactics that have served him so well to date. Mr. Trump continues to have the last laugh at the expense of his critics and competitors, myself included.

I think electing Donald Trump would be the second-worst thing we could do this November, better only than electing Hillary Clinton to serve as the third term for the Obama administration’s radical policies. I am not pretending that Mr. Trump has suddenly become a conservative champion or even a reliable Republican: He is completely unpredictable. The problem is that Hillary is predictably liberal.

There will be none of her husband’s triangulation. Republicans are fooling themselves if they think this President Clinton would sign into law policies like Nafta, the crime bill, welfare reform, or the deficit reduction packages that marked Bill’s tenure. While Bill felt compelled to confront Sister Souljah—and less directly Jesse Jackson—to appeal to moderate voters, Hillary is more responsive to pressure from Black Lives Matter and the far left. I have no idea what Mr. Trump might do, while Mrs. Clinton is predictable. Both are scary, the former less so.

The next president will make a critical appointment to the Supreme Court, who will cast the tiebreaking vote in important cases that will set precedents for years to come. Issues like the sanctity of innocent human life, constitutional protections for religious liberty and Second Amendment rights, and limits on the unelected federal bureaucracy hang in the balance.

In my lifetime, no Democrat in the White House has ever appointed a Supreme Court justice who surprised the nation by becoming more conservative, while the opposite certainly cannot be said for Republican appointments. Mr. Trump might not support a constitutionalist conservative focused on original intent and limits on the court’s powers. He may be more likely to appoint Judge Judy. However, there is only a chance that a President Trump would nominate a bad justice, while Mrs. Clinton certainly would.

The current president has abused his executive powers to implement ObamaCare and to grant de facto amnesty for illegal immigrants, in defiance of Congress and the courts. The next president will make critical decisions on whether to renew these executive orders or issue new ones repealing past abuses, and will make key appointments who will decide whether to continue bending the law to prop up ObamaCare.

Repealing and replacing ObamaCare will require congressional action. But President Obama has proven how much can be done by a determined executive. I admire his tenacity, though not his goals or disregard for constitutional limits. Mr. Trump has had a decidedly mixed record of both supporting and opposing more government involvement in health care. Mrs. Clinton has been much more consistent in favor of a big-government approach, dating to her own failed efforts in the 1990s.

If elected, Mrs. Clinton will continue hindering affordable domestic energy, increasing dependence on government and the growth of welfare programs, growing the nation’s debt and weakening America abroad. She will more firmly establish a culture of victimhood and identity politics, further dividing Americans rather than uniting us, and will continue promoting redistribution and government interference rather than growth and freedom.

I do not pretend Donald Trump is the Reaganesque leader we so desperately need, but he is certainly the better of two bad choices. Hardly an inspiring slogan, I know. It would be better to vote for a candidate rather than simply against one. If current trends hold, I will be among the many complaining this fall about my choices.

I understand why so many of my Republican friends are in denial, while many of my Democratic friends gleefully anticipate and applaud defections. The media is poised to reward those “courageous” Republicans ready to do the “right thing” and endorse Hillary. Count me out.

Mr. Jindal is a former governor of Louisiana (2008-16), a former U.S. congressman (2005-08) and a former chairman of the Republican Governors Association.

Donald Trump can help make reality of bold House policy agenda By Rep. Paul Ryan

Source: http://www.gazettextra.com/20160602/paul_ryan_donald_trump_can_help_make_reality_of_bold_house_policy_agenda

June 2, 2016

When Donald Trump became the Republican Party’s presumptive nominee for president one month ago, many Republicans like me faced a big question.

Six months earlier, in October, as I was taking the job as House speaker, my colleagues and I were discussing an equally important question: What could House Republicans do to give Americans a clear choice about the future of the country?

Sure, count us among the majority of Americans upset with the direction our country is headed. But that’s not enough. We agreed that we must focus less on what we’re against and more on what we’re for. So, long before we knew who our nominee would be, we decided we would present the country a policy agenda that offers a better way forward. We know what we believe in, so let’s bring it to the country.

That’s how I’ve always looked at it. I’ve spent most of my adult life pursuing ways to help protect the “American Idea”—the notion that the condition of one’s birth does not determine the outcome of one’s life. The first step is always putting it on paper and having a real debate. And with the Obama presidency nearing an end, we have a real opportunity to get big things done the next four years.

That’s why next week my colleagues and I will start introducing a series of policy proposals that address the American people’s top priorities. These plans are the result of months of work by House Republicans.

The concept from the start was simple: If we had a Republican president ready to sign bills into law, what would we do?

This month, we’ll show the country what a better tax code looks like. We’ll outline a plan not just for repealing Obamacare but replacing it with a better system, more focused on patients, choices and lower costs. We’ll offer a plan to restore the Constitution and the separation of powers that decades of executive overreach have eroded. We’ll present the ideal national security and foreign policy to keep Americans safe. We’ll show how we can reform rules and regulations so they’re spurring the economy and creating jobs, not destroying them. And we’ll offer a better way to help lift people out of poverty and into lives of self-determination.

It will be a positive, optimistic vision for a more confident America.

It’s short of all that’s required to save the country, but the goal was to focus on issues that unite Republicans. It’s a bold agenda but one that can bring together all wings of the Republican Party as well as appeal to most Americans.

One person who we know won’t support it is Hillary Clinton. A Clinton White House would mean four more years of liberal cronyism and a government more out for itself than the people it serves. Quite simply, she represents all that our agenda aims to fix.

To enact these ideas, we need a Republican president willing to sign them into law. That’s why, when he sealed the nomination, I could not offer my support for Donald Trump before discussing policies and basic principles.

As I said from the start, my goal has been to unite the party so we can win in the fall. And if we’re going to unite, it has to be over ideas.

Donald Trump and I have talked at great length about things such as the proper role of the executive and fundamental principles such as the protection of life. The list of potential Supreme Court nominees he released after our first meeting was very encouraging.

But the House policy agenda has been the main focus of our dialogue. We’ve talked about the common ground this agenda can represent. We’ve discussed how the House can be a driver of policy ideas. We’ve talked about how important these reforms are to saving our country. And we’ve talked about how, by focusing on issues that unite Republicans, we can work together to heal the fissures developed through the primary.

Through these conversations, I feel confident he would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives. That’s why I’ll be voting for him this fall.

It’s no secret that he and I have our differences. I won’t pretend otherwise. And when I feel the need to, I’ll continue to speak my mind. But the reality is, on the issues that make up our agenda, we have more common ground than disagreement.

For me, it’s a question of how to move ahead on the ideas that I—and my House colleagues—have invested so much in through the years. It’s not just a choice of two people, but of two visions for America. And House Republicans are helping shape that Republican vision by offering a bold policy agenda, by offering a better way ahead.

Donald Trump can help us make it a reality.

Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Janesville represents Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District and serves as speaker of the House. Readers can send mail to him at the Janesville Constituent Services Center, 20 S. Main St., Suite 10, Janesville, WI 53545; Washington, D.C., phone 202-225-3031. Send email through www.paulryan.house.gov.