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Former Obama Officials Ordered By Judge To Answer Questions Over Clinton Emails

A federal judge ordered multiple senior Obama Administration officials, State Department officials and former Hillary Clinton aides Thursday to provide answers under oath to questions requested by Judicial Watch after a roughly four year court battle.

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Judicial Watch, a leading conservative non-profit watchdog group, announced the schedule of depositions in their case in a press release Thursday. The Judicial Watch questions regard two separate cases regarding the Obama administration’s actions during the Benghazi terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate and CIA Annex in Libya, and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to send classified government emails.

“Judicial Watch is doing the heavy lifting on the ongoing Clinton email scandal, even as Congress dropped the ball and DOJ and State continued to obstruct our quest for the truth,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, in a press release Thursday.

“The Court in our case wants real answers on the Clinton email scandal which is why our request for basic discovery was granted.”

District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ordered senior officials — including Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Jacob Sullivan, and FBI official E.W. Priestap – to respond under oath and submit the answers in writing to the questions provided by Judicial Watch. The decision from Lamberth was made this past January.

Lamberth ordered the discovery from the watchdog’s July 2014 FOIA lawsuit, which was filed after the State Department failed to respond to an earlier request made May 13, 2014.

Judicial Watch requests:

Copies of any updates and/or talking points given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency concerning, regarding, or related to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Any and all records or communications concerning, regarding, or relating to talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency.

Judicial Watch’s discovery will seek answers to:

Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

The confirmed discovery schedule now includes:

March 12: State Department’s responses to interrogatories and document requests were due.
March 14: Deposition of Justin Cooper, a former aide to Bill Clinton who reportedly had no security clearance and is believed to have played a key role in setting up Hillary Clinton’s non-government email system.
April 5: Deposition of John Hackett, a State Department records official “immediately responsible for responding to requests for records under the Freedom of Information Act.”
April 16: Deposition of Jacob “Jake” Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s former senior advisor and deputy chief of staff.
April 23: Deposition of Sheryl Walter, former State Department Director of the Office of Information Programs and Services/Global Information Services.
April 26: Deposition of Gene Smilansky, a State Department lawyer.
April 30. Deposition of Monica Tillery, a State Department official.
May 7: Deposition of Jonathon Wasser, who was a management analyst on the Executive Secretariat staff. Wasser worked for Deputy Director Clarence Finney and was the State Department employee who actually conducted the searches for records in response to FOIA requests to the Office of the Secretary.
May 14: Deposition of Clarence Finney, the deputy director of the Executive Secretariat staff who was the principal advisor and records management expert in the Office of the Secretary responsible for control of all correspondence and records for Hillary Clinton and other State Department officials.
June 11: 30(b)(6) Deposition, which will be designated by the State Department.
June 13: Deposition of Heather Samuelson, the former State Department senior advisor who helped facilitate the State Department’s receipt and release of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

To Be Determined

As yet to be determined is the deposition date for Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell, who wrote a March 2, 2009, internal memorandum titled “Use of Blackberries on Mahogany Row,” in which he strongly advised that the devices not be allowed.

Written questions under oath are to be answered by:

Monica Hanley, Hillary Clinton’s former confidential assistant at the State Department.
Lauren Jiloty, Clinton’s former special assistant.
E.W. Priestap, who is serving as assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division and helped oversee both the Clinton email and the 2016 presidential campaign investigations. Priestap testified in a separate lawsuit that Clinton was the subject of a grand jury investigation related to her BlackBerry email accounts.
Susan Rice, President Obama’s former UN ambassador who appeared on Sunday television news shows following the Benghazi attacks, blaming a “hateful video.” Rice was also Obama’s national security advisor involved in the “unmasking” the identities of senior Trump officials caught up in the surveillance of foreign targets.
Ben Rhodes, an Obama-era White House deputy strategic communications adviser who attempted to orchestrate a campaign to “reinforce” Obama and to portray the Benghazi consulate terrorist attack as being “rooted in an Internet video, and not a failure of policy.”

FBI Strived to Protect Clinton Prior to 2016 Election, Emails Show

Senior FBI officials scrambled to protect Hillary Clinton “at all costs” in the days running up to the 2016 presidential election, new emails show.

The FBI email threads show the Bureau’s highest-ranking officials doing everything in their power to appease Hillary Clinton’s team.

Foxnews.com reports: The trove of documents turned over by the FBI, in response to a lawsuit by the transparency group Judicial Watch, also included discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page concerning a potential quid pro quo between the State Department and the FBI — in which the FBI would agree to effectively hide the fact that a Clinton email was classified in exchange for more legal attache positions that would benefit the FBI abroad.

The quid pro quo would have involved the FBI providing some other public reason for withholding the Clinton email from disclosure amid a Freedom of Information Act request, besides its classification level. There are no indications the proposed arrangement ever took place.

And, in the face of mounting criticism aimed at the FBI, the documents revealed that Comey quoted the 19th century poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by assuring his subordinates, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”

The FBI did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment on the released emails.

On Oct. 28, 2016, Comey upended the presidential campaign by informing Congress that the FBI would quickly review the Weiner laptop. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog later faulted the FBI for failing to review the Weiner laptop through much of the fall of 2016, and suggested it was possible that now-fired FBI Agent Peter Strzok may have slow-walked the laptop analysis until other federal prosecutors pressured the FBI to review its contents.

On the afternoon of Oct. 28, Clinton lawyer David Kendall demanded answers from the FBI — and the agency jumped into action, the emails showed.

Many of the emails found on the computer were between Clinton and her senior adviser Huma Abedin, Weiner’s now-estranged wife. Despite claims by top FBI officials, including Strzok, several of those emails were determined to contain classified information.

“I received the email below from David Kendall and I called him back,” then-FBI General Counsel James Baker wrote to the agency’s top brass, including Comey, Page and Strzok, in an email. “Before doing so I alerted DOJ via email that I would do that.”

Page and Strzok eventually were revealed to be having an extramarital affair, and Strzok was terminated after a slew of text messages surfaced in which he and Page derided Trump and his supporters using their government-issued phones. Republicans, citing some of those text messages, have accused Strzok and Page of orchestrating a coordinated leak strategy aimed at harming the president.

Although a portion of Kendall’s email was redacted, Baker continued: “He said that our letter was ‘tantalizingly ambiguous’ and made statements that were ‘inchoate and highly ominous’ such that what we had done was worse than transparency because it allows people to make whatever they want out of the letter to the prejudice of Secretary Clinton. … I told him that I could not respond to his requests at this time but that I would discuss it with others and get back to him.

“I suggest that we have some kind of follow up meeting or phone call with this group either this evening or over the weekend to address this and probably other issues/questions that come up in the next 24 hours,” Baker concluded. “Sound reasonable?”

In a partially redacted response, Strzok agreed to spearhead a conference call among the FBI’s top officials the next day.

On Nov. 6 — just two days before Election Day — Comey sent another letter to Congress stating that agents had concluded their review of “all of the communications” to or from Clinton while she was secretary of state that appeared on the laptop, and that the review did not change his assessment that Clinton should not be prosecuted.

In an email also sent Nov. 6 and unearthed by Judicial Watch, Strzok wrote to the FBI’s leadership: “[Redacted], Jon and I completed our review of all of the potential HRC work emails on the [Anthony Weiner] laptop. We found no previously unknown, potentially classified emails on the media.”

Strzok added that a team was coming in to “triple-check” his methodology and conclusions.

However, at least 18 classified emails sent from Abedin’s account were found by the FBI on the Weiner laptop. And, despite Strzok’s apparent claim, FBI officials later conceded they had not manually screened all of the nearly 700,000 emails on the laptop, but instead used computer technology to prioritize which emails to screen as Election Day rapidly approached.

“It is big news that, just days before the presidential election, Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyer pressured the top lawyer for the FBI on the infamous Weiner laptop emails,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “These documents further underscore that the fix was in for Hillary Clinton. When will the Justice Department and FBI finally do an honest investigation of the Clinton email scandal?”

Separately, another email from Page, apparently sent in response to a Judicial Watch lawsuit, discussed an apparent attempt by the State Department to pressure the FBI to downgrade the classification level of a Clinton email.

“Jason Herring will be providing you with three 302s [witness reports] of current and former FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton investigation,” Page wrote. “These 302s are scheduled to be released to Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced (with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week.

Page continued: “As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD [deputy assistant director in International Operations Division] and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT [legal attaché] positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else.”

Fox News has previously reported, citing FBI documents, that a senior State Department official proposed a quid pro quo to convince the FBI to strip the classification on an email from Clinton’s server – and repeatedly tried to “influence” the bureau’s decision when his offer was denied, even taking his plea up the chain of command.

Through it all, the trove of documents suggested that top to bottom, FBI brass were convinced they were acting appropriately.

In response to a press release from Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley that criticized the FBI for failing to provide unclassified information on its Clinton probe in a timely and thorough manner to Congress, Comey quoted Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self Reliance.”

“Outstanding. … I should have added that I’m proud of the way we have handled this release [of unclassified information],” Comey wrote to his subordinates, including Strzok, on Sept. 2, 2016. “Thanks for the work on it. Just another reminder that Emerson was right when he said, ‘To be great is to be misunderstood.’ Have a great and quiet weekend.”

Page forwarded the email along to her colleagues, including Strzok, and added a smiley face.

Trump fired Comey in 2017, leading to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation after Comey leaked a series of memos he recorded while speaking with Trump privately.

Comey acknowledged in closed-door testimony in December that as of July 2016, investigators “didn’t know whether we had anything” implicating Trump in improper Russia collusion, and that “in fact, when I was fired as director [in May 2017], I still didn’t know whether there was anything to it.”

Lisa Page Caught in ‘Quid Pro Quo’ Scandal Over Classified Hillary Clinton Email

Thank you, Judicial Watch.

Thanks to an email uncovered by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, we now know that former FBI lawyer Lisa Page described a ‘quid pro quo’ with the State Department to cover up a classified email found on Hillary Clinton’s private server.

Lisa Page, who was an FBI lawyer at the time, sent her paramour, Peter Strzok and other FBI officials an email a few weeks before election day in 2016 worrying about a pending FOIA disclosure that would reveal a discussion between top State Department officials and DOJ officials about a potential quid pro quo agreement.

The quid pro quo arrangement would have the State Department giving the FBI more “LEGAT positions” for its overseas office in exchange for hiding one of Hillary Clinton’s emails from the public.

Lisa Page asked the State Department if the FBI could “change the basis of the FOIA” withhold [decision] re Hillary’s email from classified to “something else.”

Screenshot of Lisa Page’s quid pro quo email via the Daily Mail:

The quid pro quo plan never concluded, however, the email from Lisa Page to other FBI officials, including her paramour Peter Strzok showed she was working to protect Hillary Clinton.

“Jason Herring will be providing you with three 302s of current and former FBI employees who were interviewed during the course of the Clinton investigation,” Lisa Page warned.

“These 302s are scheduled to be released to Congress in an unredacted form at the end of the week, and produced (with redactions) pursuant to FOIA at the beginning of next week.” Page added.

“As you will see, they describe a discussion about potential quid pro quo arrangement between then-DAD in IOD and an Undersecretary at the State Department whereby IOD would get more LEGAT positions if the FBI could change the basis of the FOIA withhold re a Clinton email from classified to something else,” Page wrote in an email dated October 13, 2016.

The Lisa Page email was discovered by conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch as part of a tranche of documents it received Monday from a previous FOIA lawsuit.

Judicial Watch received the new records in response to a May 21 order in a January 2018 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed, since Congress doesn’t do even their basic job of oversight.

What else was the FBI doing behind the scenes to cover up Hillary Clinton’s crimes?

Obama Officials Ordered To Answer In Benghazi Lies, Email Scandal

Susan Rice and a number of Obama and Clinton cronies have been ordered by a federal judge to answer questions concerning Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server and the Benghazi attack.

by Georgette

On Tuesday, a federal judge, who is apparently sick and tired of deep state shenanigans, ordered Obama lackeys Susan Rice and Ben Rhodes, along with former Secretary of State Clinton staffers Monica Hanley and Lauren Jiloty, and E.W. (Bill) Priestap, an FBI official who supervised the investigation into Clinton’s emails, to answer written questions in what appears to be an attempt to “hoodwink the court.”

The case involves a Freedom of Information Act request issued by Judicial Watch concerning the 2012 Benghazi attack in Libya.

Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that these State Department officials, and others must come clean about both the attack, and Clinton’s use of an illegal private server.

“The lawsuit by Judicial Watch – now with the U.S. Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit – was first filed in 2014 in an effort to obtain records related to Clinton and her staff’s response to the Benghazi attack.

“Specifically, the group sought documents about Rice’s explanation immediately after the attack on the U.S. compound that characterized it as a protest turned violent instead of a deliberate terrorist assault. At the time of the attack, Rice was serving as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.”

However, the case has “expanded to question the motives behind Clinton’s private email use while Secretary and behind the government’s conduct in this litigation,” Lamberth wrote.

The judge seems quite fed up Department of State cover ups.

Judicial Watch argues that Clinton intentionally used her private email server in an attempt to shield her communications from FOIA requests, and that the State Department acted deceptively and did not really try to complete the request, for years.

Lamberth ruled that JW can question the State Department on the development of Rice’s “talking points” for her media appearances, the “advance dissemination or discussion of those talking points,” the “aftermath of Rice’s appearances” and State Department officials’ “evolving understanding of the Benghazi attack.”

“Rice’s talking points and State’s understanding of the attack play an unavoidably central role in this case,” he argued, and the judge added that those issues could uncover “unsearched, relevant records” and “shed light on Clinton’s motives for shielding her emails from FOIA requesters.”

Rhodes, who “helped develop Rice’s talking points,” will have to answer to, but neither will have to answer in person.

Lamberth said Judicial Watch can’t “appoint itself as a freelance Inspector General” and conduct its own investigation into the Benghazi lie, “But that’s not what Judicial Watch does here,” he wrote.

“Though Judicial Watch cannot helm a fishing expedition trawling anything and everything concerning the Benghazi attack,” under the law, the group has the right to ask questions concerning the cover up of communications concerning the incident that killed four American patriots.

During appearances on Sunday morning talk shows after the Benghazi attack, Rice claimed that information ‘available’ indicated the terror attack was a “spontaneous reaction” and a “copycat” of a protest against the U.S. embassy in Cairo.

However, according to a number of people, that was a lie.

The lawsuit is looking to prove that Rice, Clinton and other government officials intentionally deceived the public about the nature of the attack, which they knew was perpetrated by terrorists.

Obama administration officials attributed the initial “confusion” about the cause of the attack to the “fog of war.”

Lamberth previously ruled that JW could probe the illegal server use as well.

In that ruling, he said the case involved “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency” and that he had doubts the State Department was acting in “good faith” to grant Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

Lamberth said State Department “officials already knew Clinton’s emails were missing from its records,” despite the fact that the illegal action was exposed six months after the initial case was filed.

“State played this card close to its chest,” Lamberth wrote. “At best, State’s attempt to pass-off its deficient search as legally adequate during settlement negotiations was negligence born out of incompetence. At worst career employees in the State and Justice Departments colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA, and hoodwink this Court.”

He said the Justice Department under the Trump administration “made things worse,” and that DOJ lawyers’ claims that the officials didn’t know the emails were missing “strain credulity.”

“Did the Department merely fear what might be found? Or was State’s bungling just the unfortunate result of bureaucratic red tape and a failure to communicate?” Lamberth wondered.

“To preserve the Department’s integrity, and to reassure the American people their government remains committed to transparency and the rule of law, this suspicion cannot be allowed to fester,” the judge wrote.

Lamberth approved deposition of eight officials who worked at the State Department under Clinton, “as well as the Clinton Foundation employee who set up Clinton’s private server, and officials from the Office of Information Program and Services who worked on the case.”

The judge gave the parties 120 days to complete the discovery phase of the case. After that, he will determine “the adequacy of State’s searches” and if Judicial Watch needs to depose more witnesses, “including Hillary Clinton.”

Federal Judge Orders Rhodes, Rice, & Other Obama Officials To Respond Over Clinton Benghazi/Email Scandal

This article was originally published by Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge

In what Judicial Watch describes as a “major victory for accountability,” a federal judge ruled Tuesday that former national security adviser Susan Rice and former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes must answer written questions about the State Department’s response to the deadly 2012 terror attack in Benghazi, Libya, as part of an ongoing legal battle over whether Hillary Clinton sought to deliberately evade public record laws by using a private email server while secretary of state.

As Fox News’ Samuel Chamberlain reports, the judge’s order amounts to approval of a discovery plan he ordered last month. In that ruling, Lamberth wrote that Clinton’s use of a private email account was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency” and said the response of the State and Justice Departments “smacks of outrageous misconduct.”

Judicial Watch announced last night that United States District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that discovery can begin in Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Obama administration senior State Department officials, lawyers, and Clinton aides will now be deposed under oath. Senior officials – including Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, Jacob Sullivan, and FBI official E.W. Priestap – will now have to answer Judicial Watch’s written questions under oath. The court rejected the DOJ and State Department’s objections to Judicial Watch’s court-ordered discovery plan. (The court, in ordering a discovery plan last month, ruled that the Clinton email system was “one of the gravest modern offenses to government transparency.”)

Judicial Watch’s discovery will seek answers to:

Whether Clinton intentionally attempted to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by using a non-government email system;
whether the State Department’s efforts to settle this case beginning in late 2014 amounted to bad faith; and
whether the State Department adequately searched for records responsive to Judicial Watch’s FOIA request.

Discovery is scheduled to be completed within 120 days. The court will hold a post-discovery hearing to determine if Judicial Watch may also depose additional witnesses, including Clinton and her former Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.

Judge Lamberth ordered written responses under oath to Judicial Watch’s questions from Obama administration senior officials Rice, Rhodes and Sullivan, and former FBI official Priestap. Rice and Rhodes will answer interrogatories under oath on the Benghazi scandal. Rejecting the State and Justice Department objections to discovery on the infamous Benghazi talking points, Judge Lamberth reiterated:

Yet Rice’s talking points and State’s understanding of the attack play an unavoidably central role in this case: information about the points’ development and content, as well as their discussion and dissemination before and after Rice’s appearances could reveal unsearched, relevant records; State’s role in the points’ content and development could shed light on Clinton’s motives for shielding her emails from FOIA requesters or on State’s reluctance to search her emails.

Judicial Watch also may serve interrogatories on Monica Hanley, a former staff member in the State Department’s Office of the Secretary, and on Lauren Jiloty, Clinton’s former special assistant.

According to Lamberth’s order, regarding whether Clinton’s private email use while Secretary of State was an intentional attempt to evade FOIA, Judicial Watch may depose:

Eric Boswell, the former Assistant Secretary for Diplomatic Security.… Boswell’s March 2009 memo to Mills … discusses security risks Clinton’s Blackberry use posed more generally. And Boswell personally discussed the memo with Clinton. So, he plainly has relevant information about that conversation and about his general knowledge of Clinton’s email use. Judicial Watch may depose Boswell.

Justin Cooper. the Clinton Foundation employee who created the clintonemail.com server. In its proposal, Judicial Watch noted Cooper’s prior congressional testimony “appears to contradict portions of the testimony provided by Huma Abedin in the case before Judge Sullivan.” … Cooper repeatedly told Congress that Abedin helped set-up the Clintons’ private server, e.g., Examining Preservation of State Department Federal Records: [before a Congressional hearing] Abedin testified under oath she did not know about the server until six years later.… Judicial Watch may depose Cooper.

Clarence Finney, the former deputy director of State’s Executive Secretariat staff…. [T]his case’s questions hinge on what specific State employees knew and when they knew it. As the principal advisor and records management expert responsible for controlling Clinton’s official correspondence and records, Finney’s knowledge is particularly relevant. And especially given the concerns about government misconduct that prompted this discovery, Judicial Watch’s ability to take his direct testimony and ask follow-up questions is critical.

Additionally, Judicial Watch states that it seeks to go beyond cursory, second-hand testimony and directly ask Finney what he knew about Clinton’s email use. This includes asking about emails suggesting he knew about her private email use in 2014, and emails he received concerning a December 2012 FOIA request from Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington (CREW) regarding senior officials’ personal email use-topics State’s 30(b)(6) deposition in Judge Sullivan’s case never addressed. Judicial Watch may depose Finney.

4. Heather Samuelson. the former State Department senior advisor who helped facilitate State’s receipt of Hillary Clinton’s emails.… [T]his case turns on what specific government employees knew and when they knew it. Judicial Watch must be able to take their direct testimony and ask them follow-up questions. Judicial Watch may depose Samuelson.

5. Jacob Sullivan. Secretary Clinton’s former senior advisor and deputy Chief of Staff. The government does not oppose Sullivan’s deposition.

Regarding whether the State Department’s settlement attempts that began in late 2014 amounted to “bad faith,” Judicial Watch was granted depositions from the State Department under Rule 30(b)(6); Finney; John Hackett, the former deputy director of State’s Office of Information Programs & Services; Gene Smilansky, an attorney-advisor within State’s Office of the Legal Advisor; Samuelson; and others.

Judicial Watch was also granted interrogatories on whether the State Department adequately searched for responsive records, as well as several document requests.

“In a major victory for accountability, Judge Lamberth today authorized Judicial Watch to take discovery on whether the Clinton email system evaded FOIA and whether the Benghazi scandal was one reason for keeping Mrs. Clinton’s email secret,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

“Today, Judicial Watch issued document requests and other discovery to the State Department about the Clinton email scandal. Next up, we will begin questioning key witnesses under oath.”

The court-ordered discovery is the latest development in Judicial Watch’s July 2014 FOIA lawsuit filed after the U.S. Department of State failed to respond to a May 13, 2014 FOIA request (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Judicial Watch seeks:

Copies of any updates and/or talking points given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency concerning, regarding, or related to the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Any and all records or communications concerning, regarding, or relating to talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack given to Ambassador Rice by the White House or any federal agency.

The Judicial Watch discovery plan was in response to a December 6, 2018, ruling by Judge Lamberth.

Incredibly, Justice Department attorneys admit in a filing opposing Judicial Watch’s limited discovery that “Counsel for State contacted the counsel of some third parties that Plaintiff originally included in its draft discovery proposal to obtain their client’s position on being deposed.” This collusion occurred despite criticism from the Court that the DOJ engaged in “chicanery” to cover up misconduct and that career employees in the State and Justice Departments may have “colluded to scuttle public scrutiny of Clinton, skirt FOIA, and hoodwink this Court.”

Judicial Watch countered that “[t]he government’s proposal, which is really nothing more than an opposition to [Judicial Watch’s] plan, demonstrates that it continues to reject any impropriety on its part and that it seeks to block any meaningful inquiry into its ‘outrageous misconduct.’”

As a reminder, this Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

Review of FBI and DOJ FOIA Documents Released on Christopher Steele Indicate Incomplete List Ending in February 2016

Per our review of the documents provided to Judicial Watch per a FOIA request it appears that the FBI and DOJ may have stopped their release as of important documents in February 2016. It appears from the documents in the FOIA release that Steele was admonished in February 2016, long before the Russia investigation even began.

If this is the case, the FBI used Steele’s bogus dossier a source for their FISA warrant request long after he had been fired while claiming to the court and the public that Steele was a solid source. The FBI and DOJ also have a lot of documents left to provide.

In a report by Andrew McCarthy at the National Review, a US Senate report stated that Christopher Steele was fired from the FBI as a Confidential Human Source on November 1st, 2016. It was important to note this date because Steele’s dossier was used as the support for the FISA warrant requested from the FISA Court in mid October of 2016. Steel was fired but the story line is that it was only shortly before the FISA request was made from the court. The request was granted and renewed several times over many months into 2017.

Now we know that this may all be another lie by the Deep State DOJ and FBI. Per a review of the FOIA documents requested by Judicial watch related to Steele, it appears that Steele was admonished by the FBI in early 2016, long before the FISA warrant request and even before the start of the Trump – Russia investigation.

Judicial Watch made a Freedom of Information Request (FOIA) to obtain all records between the FBI and Christopher Steele and/or Orbis Business Intelligence (his firm).

Eventually the FBI and DOJ provided a set of documents (75 pages) on August 3, 2018. There are some identifiers in the documents that lead to the real date that Simpson was fired from the FBI which was February 2, 2016 (per below document) or before.

The request by Judicial Watch was for all documents related to Steele or his firm between January 1, 2016 and present. The documents provided by the DOJ and FBI were provided in August and the DOJ and FBI announced that this was not a complete list of documents and only an interim release.

But a review of the documents indicates that this release was only for documents up and to February 2, 2016. We know this because of the ‘Bates numbers’ on the bottom of the forms. The Bates numbers are stamped on the pages by a machine and are a numbering system for legal purposes. Bates stamping allows you to precisely indicate the one and only one document of its kind.

Large piles of documents are provided in chronological order because that is how files are arranged. This also helps when rifling through documents. Each type of form is kept together in order in a separate section of the file. By reviewing the documents provided to Judicial Watch it appears that the FBI and DOJ stopped providing documents of its meetings with Steele as of February 2, 2016. There is much more that the FBI and DOJ and Mueller team don’t want to tell us.

The problem with the records is that the story in the media and apparently in front of Congress is that Steele was fired late in 2016 and therefore his fake news dossier could be trusted, although it has never been verified by any sources. However, now we know that Steele was a bogus and weak source due to his admonishment in February of 2016 and he should never have been used as a source by the FBI from that point forward.

So the FBI and DOJ used a dossier from a creepy spy who was admonished nearly a year prior to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on a Presidential candidate and then a President, and renewed this warrant several times, even though the dossier was not verified in any way and the FBI and DOJ are reluctant to provide any documents related to their meetings with Steele after February 2016. #LockThemAllUp

Hat tip to D. Manny

No Joke; Obama Issues 2nd Open Govt. National Action Plan

It may seem like a cheap prank but the Obama administration, which has proven to be among the most secretive, has actually issued its second “Open Government National Action Plan” that promises to build on (delusional) “past successes.”

Even the president’s many friends and supporters in the mainstream media have conceded that government secrecy has actually increased significantly since he moved into the White House, despite promises of an “unprecedented level of openness in government.” Instead, federal agencies have found creative excuses to keep an alarming number of public records secret, according to an analysis conducted several years ago by a national news organization.

The problem has only gotten worse over the years, according to a number of reports and probes. Just a few months ago a national news conglomerate reported that the administration even uses covert government accounts to keep electronic mail from becoming public. When the news outlet tried accessing records of the illegal secret accounts, one federal agency, the Department of Labor (DOL) tried collecting north of $ 1 million for its list of email addresses by claiming it had to pay 50 people to work three weeks retrieving the records.

Judicial Watch encounters these sorts of obstacles regularly in its never-ending work exposing government corruption, which goes hand in hand with secrecy and often forces litigation. The Obama administration has kept JW quite busy and in court often. How bad is the problem? A few years ago JW President Tom Fitton told Congress how, under Obama, government agencies have actually created additional hurdles and stonewalled even the most basic Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. “The Bush administration was tough and tricky, but the Obama administration is tougher and trickier,” Fitton told lawmakers. Fitton testified before the House and Senate during “Sunshine Week,” a national initiative by the news media, nonprofits and other organizations to promote government transparency.

The administration’s new action plan is a sequel to a 2011 initiative that it claims set “26 commitments” that have already “increased public integrity, enhanced public access to information, improved management of public resources and given the public a more active voice in the U.S. Government’s policymaking process.” The new model will ambitiously modernize the administration of FOIA and significantly expand open data initiatives across the federal government to increase transparency.

This is laughable considering the administration’s history of secrecy without accountability. Just a few weeks ago Judicial Watch reported on the failures of an agency created by Congress to promote government transparency. Known as the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), it’s supposed to facilitate the treacherous process of obtaining public records by serving as an objective ombudsman that forces federal agencies to comply with FOIA disputes. Though Congress has given it $ 1 million, it’s failed miserably to fulfill this mission, proving the Obama administration is anything but transparent.

Judicial Watch

Plume-Gate Tales from the Script: Data Mining, a “CNN Moment” and ‘Teflon’ Obama

Tony Muga | In a series of emails contained within the NRC FOIA Documents, I have found an excellent example of how the industry monitors what the public knows, in this case in the form of public opinion via local news articles, so they can do their best at damage control. They want to know the moment something negative about the industry is published, the moment it takes off on the net.

(Plumegate) Tales from the Script: Inside the NRC FOIA Documents… Part 1

The Intel Hub By Tony Muga March 17, 2012 ‘You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.’ ~Ayn Rand Digging through the NRC FOIA documents is a Herculean task considering that there are literally thousands of pages that must be carefully sifted through. What is revealed therein however, is well worth […]

BLOCKBUSTER!!! FOIA Documents Reveal NRC Cover-Up, Deception

The Intel Hub By Tony Muga February 27, 2012 According to several stunning editorials by author Lucas W. Hixon and Joy Thompson on the website Enformable.com, evidence obtained through an FOIA request reveals a ‘cover-up’ by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in an effort to conceal the severity of the meltdowns in Fukushima, Japan. The FOIA request was initiated […]

Most Fed Agencies Violate Records Laws

In what may seem like a joke, federal agencies that have long failed to meet statutory requirements for maintaining records will help the Obama Administration craft a long-awaited, government-wide system to store and manage electronic files.

The White House has ordered agencies to submit recommendations by May 2012 to help create a new directive that will ultimately transform the government’s notoriously inept record-keeping operation. In the end, there will be an efficient and uniform records management system never before seen in the bloated federal government.

The agencies will report their ideas for improving the way they store and manage electronic files, including emails, blog posts and social media activity, according a news report that cites a White House memo issued this week. The goal is to make better use of electronic document storage technology and to create a government-wide records management framework.

This 360-degree turnaround is laughable considering the current system, which lacks any sort of uniform rules. At most government agencies employees decide which emails they think they may be required to keep, which is comical to say the least. And, as the political magazine that reported the story points out, this significantly raises the risk that emails will be lost or misplaced or that employees won’t accurately determine which messages must be archived.

Additionally, 95% of agencies fail to meet statutory requirements for maintaining files, according to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). How did the NARA come up with this figure? Based on agency self-assessments that indicate most aren’t saving the proper records or storing them electronically to ensure that they can be retrieved in the future. In other words, they openly admit that they’re blowing off record laws.

This development comes on the heels of a separate but equally disappointing move by the Obama Administration, which promised unprecedented transparency, involving public records. For nearly a year, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a cabinet-level agency within the Executive Office of the President of the United States, has failed to approve recommendations for improving public records requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

The recommendations were created by a branch, the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS), created two years ago to mediate disputes between those who request public records and the agencies that process the requests. The OGIS is also tasked with recommending policy changes to the president and Congress that will bring transparency and efficiency to the FOIA process.

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Fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online

By: Leo Hickman, The Guardian

A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday. The unauthorised publication is an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of a similar release of emails on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.

The initial email dump was apparently timed to disrupt the Copenhagen climate talks. It prompted three official inquiries in the UK and two in the US into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists’ handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is “of interest” to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.

The emails appear to be genuine, but the University of East Anglia said the “sheer volume of material” meant it was not yet able to confirm that they were. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages. The lack of any emails post-dating the 2009 release suggests that they were obtained at the same time, but held back. Their release now suggests they are intended to cause maximum impact before the upcoming climate summit in Durban which starts on Monday.

In the new release a 173MB zip file called “FOIA2011″ containing more than 5,000 new emails, was made available to download on a Russian server called Sinwt.ru today. An anonymous entity calling themselves “FOIA” then posted a link to the file on at least four blogs popular with climate sceptics – Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, TallBloke and The Air Vent. The same tactic was used in 2009 when the first 160MB batch of emails were released after being obtained – possibly illegally – from servers based at the University of East Anglia, where a number of the climate scientists involved were based.

One marked difference from the original 2009 release is that the person or persons responsible has included a message headed “background and context” which, for the first time, gives an insight into their motivations. Following some bullet-pointed quotes such as “Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $ 2 a day” and, “Nations must invest $ 37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels,” the message states:

“Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline. This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets. The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning to publicly release the passphrase. We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics.”

RE Tea Party » Technology

FOIA Lawsuit Reveals FBI Collecting Biometric Information For Massive Interagency Database

The Intel Hub
By Madison Ruppert – Editor of End the Lie
November 11, 2011

Big Brother is on the march in the United States and as I have previously shown, once one delves into the depths of this system it is nothing short of astounding to the point where Orwell wouldn’t even believe it was possible.

Previously my articles have focused mostly on the Department of Homeland Security’s role in this and how their programs are criminalizing Americans who have done absolutely nothing wrong while eroding our freedoms and liberties to a dangerous degree.

However, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights along with the National Day Labor Organizing Network and the Benjamin Cardozo Immigrant Justice Clinic, it has now emerged that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is an equally large player in the high-tech police state in which we find ourselves.

An article by Sunita Patel and Scott Paltrowitz on CommonDreams points out, “Big Brother is already upon us.”

This is a point that I attempt to make at every possible juncture as it is crucial for Americans to realize that an Orwellian high-tech police state is not something on the distant horizon but something in which we already live.

The documents obtained reveal that the FBI “views massive biometric information collection as a goal in itself” as a part of the Next Generation Identification (NGI) system.

The NGI system aims to collect fingerprints, palm prints, iris scans, identifying marks, scars, tattoos, facial characteristics and voice recognition.

These are not necessarily collected from arrested suspects but also from mobile biometric scanning devices and fingerprints left anywhere and everywhere.

This biometric information can then be used in conjunction with facial recognition technology and threat assessment algorithms that can be deployed in an airport or even on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), better known as a drone.

These drones can then track you, record your movements, who you meet with, and just about anything else. Tie this in with the Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) being tested by the Department of Homeland Security and you have a record of not only incredibly detailed biometric information but also social habits, daily schedules, etc.

All of this can be conducted without the subject’s knowledge or consent which makes this technology even more powerful as intelligence agencies can conduct surveillance on many individuals without any need to worry about being detected.

The most important aspect for anyone to grasp about these issues is that all of this technology can easily be tied together and collected in a centralized database in which astounding amounts of information from a variety of sources can be collated and analyzed.

The highly personal information stored in the NGI system is already accessible by the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, U.S. Coast Guard, and through the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services division (CJIS) more than 75 potential foreign nations.

The CJIS has already carried out a test on latent finger and palm prints in which they collected more than one million palm prints from crime scenes or literally any other location in which palm prints could be recovered.

They have also scheduled a pilot program for iris scanning and developed plans for deployment of biometric collection equipment across the nation to collect scars, marks, tattoos and facial measurements for facial recognition.

The NGI program will utilize so-called “FBI Mobile,” a type of technology first deployed by the military in warzones that is used to collect biometric information in the field without even having to arrest the subject.

The precursor to the NGI program was called Secure Communities (S-Comm) which was launched in 2008.

S-Comm links the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) databases with the FBI’s criminal database.

With this system, any time a local, state, or tribal law enforcement officer carries out a routine criminal background check, the subject of the background check’s information is transferred to the DHS database.

S-Comm was implemented in a highly deceptive manner, at first offering an opt out policy which would allow local agencies to opt out of receiving information while still requiring to send all information. Later, the FBI decided that S-Comm participation was mandatory, while waiting to disclose this fact to states and the public.

Furthermore, the FBI and DHS have both prevented states and local agencies from imposing limits on how the FBI uses the data they gather.

In a somewhat disturbing statement, senior ICE official Gary Mead told local advocates at a New York debate that governors did not have the right to restrict information sharing because letting the FBI share the information is the “price of admission” for joining “the FBI club.”

In a fact sheet published on the NGI and S-Comm, the following disturbing fact is highlighted: “Many details about the scope, impact and process of the NGI and the legal basis for the FBI’s policies are still unknown and have not been scrutinized by the media or the public.”

It also reveals that one of the major driving forces, like most of the government’s actions, is profit. Specifically, a billion dollar contract with Lockheed Martin issued in 2008 to work on the NGI with the FBI.

This is the same Lockheed Martin which represents part of the 0.01% of America that are acting in an even more parasitic manner than the 1% – the war profiteers that rake in record profits while killing Americans and innocent people abroad.

It might seem alarmist or sensationalist, but when the authors of the CommonDreams piece say, “This ubiquitous world-wide surveillance of anyone and everyone should serve as a wake up call (sic) for what the future may hold” they are simply reflecting reality.

They point out that we are being brought “closer to an extensive and inescapable surveillance state, where we blindly place our hands on electronic devices that capture our digital prints, stare into iris scanning devices that record the details of our eyes, and have pictures taken of different angles of our faces so that the FBI and other federal agencies can store and use such information.”

Of course these images taken at different angles can be compiled into a 3-Dimensional model of the face which can then be used for faster, more accurate facial recognition, even by drones flying at an altitude at which they are essentially invisible to the unsuspecting individual on the ground.

There is another major consideration ignored by the FBI and DHS: the fact that major mistakes are made by federal agencies.

One apt example is American citizen Mark Lyttle, a man who was deported and transferred to five different countries in four months when an administrator incorrectly typed “Mexico” as Lyttle’s place of birth.

Lyttle, who suffers from mental disabilities which made him unable to understand the criminal proceedings and following deportation, spent months living on the streets, in shelters, and in prisons in Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala, all because an administrator typed the wrong birthplace.

Thankfully, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) took up the case and filed lawsuits in federal courts in Georgia and North Carolina on behalf of Lyttle.

Or there is the case of American born lawyer and former Army lieutenant Brandon Mayfield who was erroneously accused of the 2004 train bombing in Madrid after which he was held by police for two weeks.

All of this was based on a supposed match between Mayfield’s fingerprints and latent prints found at the scene, of course this match was later found to be inaccurate.

The entire fiasco lasted two and a half years and in 2006 the Oregon lawyer was awarded $ 2 million by the U.S. government along with a formal apology to him and his family.

Then there is the case of a Massachusetts man, John Gass, who had his driver’s license revoked because a facial recognition system found that his authentic license was fraudulent.

These types of egregious and hardly negligible mistakes are only going to become more prevalent as the FBI employs new facial recognition and biometric technology.

This was shown by a study published by the Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response at New York University entitled, “Facial Recognition Technology: A Survey of Policy and Implementation Issues” by Lucas D. Introna and Helen Nissenbaum.

The study found that when facial recognition technology is used among large populations, like the massive federal database, incorrect identifications will indeed occur due to the lack of variation among faces.

The Gass case proves that this is already a problem and the database is in a relatively infant stage compared to how massive the NGI collection of data will be once information on every American has been gathered.

This is especially true when one considers that since sharing information is “the price of admission” into the “FBI club” many foreign governments and federal agencies will be handing over sensitive personal information of their citizens.

George Orwell couldn’t have possibly imagined the scope and pervasiveness of the invisible surveillance state we currently find ourselves in, though his infamous 1984 gives a glimpse of what a much more low-tech version of today’s world would look like.

The technology is growing to the point where many people do not even know it exists or how they are being tracked and monitored.

Hopefully by spreading information like this far and wide we can actively combat the Big Brother surveillance state before it grows to the point that there is no possible way to turn back.

If you care about the future of America and the world, I beg of you, spread this information far and wide as bringing massive awareness to this subject is the only way to halt the growth and hopefully reverse the trend.

Only by bringing this real Big Brother technology out into the mainstream can we wake up the majority of the populace to the fact that these are not silly conspiracy theories but indeed heavily documented and irrefutable facts.

To read more about the NGI and S-Comm programs, see these additional FOIA documents.