Category Archives: culture

Investigate After All?

Posted on by
Reply

After acknowledging last week that several minutes of video from a 2013 briefing on the Iran nuclear deal had been intentionally cut, the State Department announced Wednesday that Secretary of State John Kerry has ordered an investigation into who ordered the edit.

This comes on the heels of ABC News having caught the White House altering the transcript of President Barack Obama’s (D) press agent, Josh Earnest’s, briefing about another Iran-related matter.

Given State’s (and this administration’s generally) mendacity regarding this sort of thing from the jump, why should we take any investigation State might now undertake seriously?  Why should we believe its outcome to be anything other than a once-over-lightly square filler, or any “miscreant” who might be identified as anyone other than a scapegoat?

Hillary Clinton’s Insecurity

Posted on by
Reply

With her emails, that is.  Only more so.  It seems she exchanged, and was in the middle of exchanges, that were real-time discussions of drone strike permissions in Pakistan.

The 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side”—government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters—as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went ahead, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.

Unfortunately, the only thing secret about these discussions was the arrangement between State and the CIA.  They knew their discussions were in the clear because they used weasel-words (instead of encryption).

The vaguely worded messages didn’t mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about the militant targets, officials said.

But they talked around the subjects.

State Department officials told FBI investigators they communicated via the less-secure system on a few instances, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials.  It happened when decisions about imminent strikes had to be relayed fast, and the US diplomats in Pakistan or Washington didn’t have ready access to a more-secure system, either because it was night or they were traveling.

Because secure communications systems cease operations when the sun goes down.  Sure.  Traveling?  Folks important enough to be in on discussions of this nature have mobile satellite phones on them all the time.

These guys carefully ignore COMSEC considerations when they make idiotic excuses like this.  Which makes the excuses dishonest rather than idiotic.

Some of the emails were then forwarded by Mrs Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said.

And one of these guys wants to be President of the United States.  What secrets will she give up from that office, with this knowledge of security?  This knowledge of right and wrong?  What damage will she do to our nation with this level of understanding of the difference at this time that it makes?

Elections have consequences.

More Stonewalling

Posted on by
Reply

The CFPB, which was created after the financial crisis and began operation in 2011, is the latest federal agency to reject requests using a “Glomar response,” named after the Glomar Explorer, a Cold War-era ship used by intelligence officials to retrieve sunken Soviet submarines.

A Glomar rejection of a FOIA request for information is a rejection based on the premise that the agency saying “No” cannot either confirm or deny that the requested records even are in its possession.  This is an intelligence-related claim; yet the the requests are consumer-related information, and the CFPB is reputed to be a consumer-oriented Federal government entity.

With consumer-related FOIA requests, there are no intelligence questions involved.  Of course, the bureaucrats of the CFPB know this.

Sam Gilford, a CFPB spokesman, had this on the matter:

Disclosing whether the bureau possesses records about a pending or potential investigation would effectively disclose whether it has in fact investigated the institution [which could hamper an investigation].

This is disingenuous.  If an “investigation” is pending, it’s under consideration for being initiated.  If an “investigation” is merely potential, it’s just a thought in a CFPB agent’s mind.  There is no investigation extant in either case, and so there can be no hampering of one.

The CFPB is simply stonewalling.

IRS Shenanigans

Posted on by
Reply

The IRS, after three years of stonewalling and after a Federal judge’s explicit order to stand and deliver, has at last released the list of the organizations it claims to have targeted for blocking from tax exempt status.  “Claims” because the list has grown, from the 298 avowedly conservative organizations originally identified by the Treasury Department’s IG to a total of 426 that the IRS finally listed for the judge.

Edward Greim, a lawyer for NorCal Tea Party Patriots, a party to the suit demanding the IRS give up its list, had this about the difference in size between the list Treasury released three years ago and the list the IRS released:

Based on these changes, which to date remain unexplained, a very real possibility—if not probability—exists that the IRS modified its targeting in light of the investigations, packing its own internal lists of targeted groups to support its preferred narrative, including by adding ideologically diverse groups[.]

It would be interesting to see the dates of something representing the initial delay applied to each of these groups.

Stonewalling

Posted on by
Reply

This blatantly insults our intelligence.  The Republication National Committee sued in Federal court to enforce a FOIA request for a years’ worth of correspondence involving then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aides, including her former chief of staff, Cheryl Mills; Jacob Sullivan, one of her advisers; and Patrick Kennedy, a senior State official at the time, a FOIA request against which State had already been stonewalling.  In response, State had a filing:

The State Department has told a federal court that processing a Republican National Committee demand for documents relating to Hillary Clinton and her aides would take as long as 75 years—and would stretch “generations.”

Generations to check out a year.  State expanded on those 75 years:

…it would take approximately 16-and-2/3 years to complete the review of the Mills documents, 33-and-1/3 years to finish the review of the Sullivan documents, and 25 years to wrap up the review of the Kennedy documents — or 75 years in total[.]

Because, State says, it’ll only process 500 pages, per month, and there are 450,000 pages of these documents.

The presiding judge should hold those State Department bureaucrats in contempt of court and send his bailiff to seize the records and the computers on which they sit, as well as any hard copy files, and bring them to his court where a court-appointed team of evaluators can go over them.

Fat chance, unfortunately.