>sarc.>

Scott Adams ‏@ScottAdamsSays
Russian hackers are better than we thought. They stole Clinton's emails from the NSA, put them on Huma's laptop, and pinned it on Weiner.

I know... It is just too outrageous & desperate to be annoying.

Clinton Foundation memo reveals Bill and Hillary as partners in crime

Last week, WikiLeaks dropped a 2011 memo by top Bill Clinton aide Doug Band that lays bare Team Clinton’s sordid financial dealings when Hillary Clinton was secretary of State.

Band describes how the Clinton Foundation served as a conduit for what he called “Bill Clinton Inc.” — the former president’s for-profit arm. Other documents show State Department involvement.

The result is an unsavory mix of charity work, profiteering, and pay-to-play politics that potentially reaches the highest levels of US foreign policy and screams for IRS and Department of Justice reviews.

At center is Band and his consulting firm Teneo. Band served as gatekeeper to all things Bill Clinton. Those wanting a former president as golf partner ponied up. Requests for Foundation dough followed. Next came Clinton Inc. — the steady stream of speeches, books, and honorary titles that enriched Bill Clinton. Teneo managed it all.

Huge corporations and others seeking Clinton’s orbit lined up. Teneo’s clients included major U.S. corporations Coca-Cola and Dow Chemical, which donated huge sums.

Foreign firms like UBS donated and greased Clinton Inc.

For-profit Laureate International Universities went further, buying Clinton “advice” and rights to his prestige for $3.5 million annually. In all, Band states Teneo’s management yielded the former president $50 million — including a $2 million upfront slice of Band’s firm — with another $66 million queued. Band also facilitated political activity including securing campaign donors and managing Clinton’s political schedule.

Before daughter Chelsea Clinton intervened and ordered a compliance review, no one separated charity from profit-making time. Blurred lines were most blatant at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) — the annual confab where the world’s elite fete the former president and discuss world events.

Doug Band on his Bill Clinton Inc. memo: "I'm also starting to worry that if this story gets out, we are screwed." https://t.co/lx5Sczbtk7 pic.twitter.com/zWo8JSOOE6
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) October 30, 2016

According to the memo Teneo embedded at the conference’s hotel, hustled business, comped $20,000 CGI memberships to potential clients, and burnished its Clinton-gatekeeper role.

At one point Band even had Clinton staff calling British lawmakers for Dow Chemical “on behalf of President Clinton.” Band justified the set up arguing, “I believed, rightly or wrongly, that Teneo’s further development of its clients to be bigger donors to the Foundation and CGI was an important priority.”

Nice foundation you got there — be a shame if my clients weren’t funding it.

Doug Band really does not seem to like Chelsea interfering w/ Clinton Foundation business #wikileaks https://t.co/kmlsSu4OWu pic.twitter.com/4TvoCePaqO
— Charlie Hoffmann (@choffmann10) October 28, 2016

From an IRS standpoint, red flags should abound. Charities must detail how they separate nonprofit from for-profit business. Those benefiting private interests or inure “insider” private gain lose their tax-deductible status because Treasury is cheated.

One IRS concern is, “Establishing exclusive business dealings with a particular for-profit business.” Band was clearly jeopardizing the Foundation’s status. Clinton eventually resigned as Teneo’s honorary chairman and kept only $100,000.

More disturbing was the unseemly mix of Band and Teneo clients with the State Department during Ms. Clinton’s tenure.

Clintons have over ‘500 Different’ conflicts of interest -- Clinton Foundation Executive Doug Band #PodestaEmails
https://t.co/8uMiBzNvsv pic.twitter.com/GtmdEo55sm
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) October 21, 2016

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http://www.thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/presidential-campaign/303663-bill-and-hillary-partners-in-crime-literally

Clinton Foundation Scandal: A Justice Department Cover-Up Exposed?

Corruption: Lost in the hurricane of news about the FBI's renewed investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email is a bombshell of possibly greater importance — an apparent attempt by Obama's Justice Department to quash an FBI probe into the troubled Clinton Foundation.

Back in August, the Daily Caller reported that the FBI and several U.S. attorneys offices were conducting a joint investigation of the foundation for financial crimes and influence peddling.

It was a major story that, naturally, other news outlets ignored, until this weekend. In an extensive report on battles within the FBI and Justice Department over how to handle various investigations involving people in Clinton's orbit, the Wall Street Journal revealed deep in the story how senior officials at Justice tried to thwart the FBI from looking too closely at the Clinton Foundation.

"Early this year, four FBI field offices — New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Little Rock, Ark. — were collecting information about the Clinton Foundation to see if there was evidence of financial crimes or influence-peddling," the Journal reported.

But when these investigators presented their findings to the Justice Department in February 2016, Justice refused to grant them the authority to use more aggressive investigative techniques, such as issuing subpoenas or conducting formal interviews.

Then, on Aug. 12 — the day after the Daily Caller piece ran — a "very pissed off" senior Justice Department official called Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe after learning that FBI agents were nevertheless still pursuing the Clinton Foundation case.

The Journal quotes FBI agents who said they were then told to "stand down" from the probe.

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http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clinton-foundation-scandal-a-justice-dept-cover-up-exposed/

Is Obama's Department of Justice covering for the Clintons?

http://www.yahoo.com/news/obamas-department-justice-covering-clintons-102346617.html

What are you laughing at?

Sit Still!

.....and now Comey is playing the same Old Song:"There is no Culpability"!

another Clinton-Critter!

He's only taking precautions so that he doesn't get into an out-of-character histeria, kill his wife, burn down his home and shoot himself. Call it prevention.

He's only taking precautions so that he doesn't get into an out-of-character histeria, kill his wife, burn down his home and shoot himself. Call it prevention.

you forgot...............and shoots himself in the back of the Head twice,fatally both times!

so now, it's back to the ......"it's all rigged against me" strategy

Comey opened the investigation.......i like him, he's fine man...
Comey filed no criminal charges......i hate him, he's a loser...

Comey re-opened the investigation....i like him, he & fbi are doing a fine job
Comey closes the investigation no charges.....i hate him...can't be done folks, it's all rigged

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-31/doj-tells-congress-it-will-work-expeditiously-review-abedin-emails-there-just-one-pr

<snip>So far so good, even if one wonders just how active the DOJ will be in a case that has shown an unprecedented schism between the politically influenced Department of Justice and the FBI.

And yet, something felt odd about this.

Kadzik... Kadzik... where have we heard that name?

Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, "Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary's Benghazi Hearing" in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony?

It was Peter Kadzik.<snip>

In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton's Campaign chair, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.

For those who missed it, this is what we reported previously:

The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, who is currently a top official at the US Justice Department serving as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs.



The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the Wikileaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant. The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just one day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.



Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows. Another email sent on May 5, 2015, Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.

As the Daily Caller noted, the dinner arrangement "is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices." As one former U.S. Attorney tells told the DC, the exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department.

The hacked emails confirm that Podesta and Kadzik were in frequent contact. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.

“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.

“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.

Kadzik's role at the DOJ, where he started in 2013, is particularly notable Kadzik, as helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.

It gets better because, as we further revealed, if there is one person in the DOJ who is John Podesta's, and thus the Clinton Foundation's inside man, it is Peter Kadjik.

Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office. That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account. In a Sept. 2008 email, which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign. Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”

Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal. As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky. In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.

Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.

Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation. But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time. “He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe. Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.

Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.

Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon. To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001. A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”

The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon. On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon. She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.

Kadzik's current role

In his current role as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.

But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.

In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”

DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik — “are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.”

It is unknown if Kadzik responded to DeSantis’ questions.

Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton. Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to say whether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.

Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.

Finally, it is also worth noting that Kadzik's wife, Amy Weiss, currently at Weiss Public Affairs worked on the 1992 Clinton/Gore Campaign as a Press Secretary, and Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee, and a White House Deputy Assistant to the President/Deputy Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton.

* * *

And now it seems that Kadzik will be in charge of the DOJ's "probe" into Huma Abedin's emails. Which is why we are a little skeptical the DOJ will find "anything" of note.