This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Legal

  • Bye, Corrine. Don’t Let the Door Hit You On the Way Out.

    Remember that       manifestly corrupt drooling idiot       esteemed US Representative from Florida, Rep. Corrine Brown?  You should; Jonn and TSO have written about the individual here multiple times – first here, then here, then here, then here, and finally here.  And I might have missed an article or two.

    In case you’ve forgotten:  she was recently indicted, along with her chief-of-staff, on fraud and other Federal charges – as in more than 20 total counts.  And she also had some, um, interesting things to say about the Orlando Pulse terrorist shooting incident.

    Well, Rep. Brown ran for reelection in yesterday’s Florida primary election.

    She lost.

    Gee.  That’s too bad.

    But at least it doesn’t look like she needs to worry too much about future employment.  I’m guessing that’s pretty well already arranged.

    Wonder how she’ll look in an orange jumpsuit?  (smile)

  • Yet Another Update About That “Private” Email . . . .

    Well, this should be no surprise.  Remember the other day that I mentioned the release of 725 pages of email from Clintoon confidante Huma Abedin?

    Well, they were indeed released.  Sorta

    I say “sorta” because it appears that roughly 250 pages “released” – or over 1/3 of the total – were heavily redacted.  Heavily redacted, as in “100%”.

    Why, you ask?  Good question.

    But maybe we can discern a few possibilities by looking at the 7 July exchange between the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Mr. Charles McCollough, IG for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, concerning some of the Clintoon “private email” that the ODNI IG had been asked to review prior to its release to Congress.  Here’s a quote from that exchange, with a bit of emphasis added.

    Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, generated the response by asking McCullough if he could provide the committee, in a secure format, the classified emails transmitted over Clinton’s private email server.

    “I cannot provide a certain segment of them because the agency that owns the information for those emails has limited the distribution on those,” McCullough explained. “They are characterizing them as OrCon, ‘originator control,’ so I can’t give them to even Congress without getting the agency’s permission to provide them.”

    “Which agency?” Chaffetz interjected.

    “I can’t say that in an open hearing sir,” McCullough replied.

    . . . .

    “This is the segment of emails that I had to have people in my office read-in to particular programs to even see these emails,” McCullough responded. “We didn’t posses the required clearances.”

    Hmm.  Remember:  McCullough and his office are the freaking IG for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  Those individuals are routinely cleared for TS-compartmented access.  Yet at first they didn’t have the requisite clearances to view the material.

    Remember, this is material that was formerly stored on Clintoon’s unsecured “private” email server.  That system was NOT authorized to store anything classified – or anything that was even Sensitive But Unclassified.  It wasn’t supposed to be storing official government information at all.  But it was.

    Nevertheless, two days prior to that exchange between McCullough and Chaffetz, FBI Director James Comey publicly declared that charges were “not appropriate”.  And even in light of the above later relevation by the IG for ODNI, the FBI has declined to prosecute anyone for anything related to this matter since that announcement.

    Wonderful.  Just freaking wonderful.

    Sheesh.  IMO this photo sums up the Administration’s (and Clintoon’s)      obviously and transparently absurd “party line”       “official position” concerning this whole convoluted mess perfectly.

     

    But you wanna hear the really sad part? I’m not sure she’s any less intelligent or competent than the current Occupant, 1600 Penn Ave, Wash DC.

    Oh, and in other news:  Clintoon apparently has a new supporter.  The California Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, Will Quigg, has endorsed her.  Further, he’s also publicly announced that Klan members have donated over $20,000 to her campaign this year.

    I’m guessing those donations haven’t been returned, either – and I’m guessing there’s a good chance they won’t be.  After all, money is money.  And the Clintoon Foundation certainly isn’t choosy regarding those from which it accepts cash.

     

     

  • More Evidence of Clintoon “Pay-for-Play”? Sure Looks Like It.

    I’ve written before about the Clintoon Foundation’s “interesting” financial dealings.  In fact, I’ve observed – on more than one occasion – that appearances indicate there could well be a “pay for play” component to the Clintoon Foundation’s dealings while Clintoon was SECSTATE.

    Well the news today to me seems, as Alice said in Wonderland might have put it, “Curioser and curioser”.

    While Clintoon was SECSTATE, it turns out her chief-of-staff Cheryl Mills was in reasonably frequent contact with top executives at the Clintoon Foundaton.  “Reasonably frequent” here translates to 148 phone messages for Mills from senior Clintoon Foundation executives over a 2 –year period (2010-2012).  State Department phone logs show that no other private individual or concern came anywhere close in terms of the number of contacts with Mills over this period.

    Further, regarding Mills there’s also this:

    Last week, the State Department acknowledged that in June 2012, Mills spent two days traveling to New York to interview job applicants at the foundation. The State Department said Mills “volunteered” to do so, but neither the department nor a spokesman for the Clinton presidential campaign, nor Mills’s attorney, would say whether Mills used annual leave or unpaid days to perform that work – or whether it was done on the taxpayers’ time.

    If that was done while Mills was “on the clock” as a Federal employee, that means it was done on taxpayer’s nickle.  If so, yeah – IMO that’s a serious problem on multiple levels.  Ditto if taxpayers funded Mills’ travel.

    Moreover, some additional and previously unreleased email involving Clintoon confidante and protégé Huma Abedin has also come to light.  What it contains is similarly quite disturbing.

    Specifically, the public interest group Judicial Watch obtained a number of Abedin’s emails recently.  Collectively, these emails show a pattern of high-dollar donors to the Clintoon Foundation receiving expedited access to the SECSTATE.  Abedin appears to have been instrumental in coordinating that expedited access.

    . . . the messages show Clinton aide Huma Abedin “provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state.” The documents include exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department.

    You can view the 725 pages of Abedin email recently released by Judicial Watch here if you like.

    IMO, that’s disturbing as hell.  It appears to bolster the theory that Clintoon was engaging in “quid quo pro” trading of official influence (as SECSTATE) for contributions to the Clintoon foundation.

    And that’s not all, either.  It appears a total of over 150 non-government officials representing private concerns met with Clintoon while she was SECSTATE.  The exact number appears to have been 154.

    So, how many of those private individuals have perchance “donated” to the Clintoon Foundation?  Glad you asked.

    Of those 154 private individuals, 85 – or over 55% of those individuals representing private concerns – also “dontated” to the Clintoon Foundation.  At least 40 of those individuals – or nearly 26% –“donated” in excess of $100k.  And 20 of them – or roughly 13% – “dontated” $1M or more.

    That makes the lower limit for those “dontations” somewhere north of $22M.  It’s estimated that the total “dontated” could be over $150M.

    One extreme case was that of the the Crown Prince of Bahrain, who had previously contributed $32M to the Clintoon Foundation for a “scholarship fund”.  That individual was given virtually immediate access to Clintoon in terms of getting a personal meeting with her after contacting Abedin.

    After seeing all of that, well, it’s kinda hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s a damn good chance that “pay for play” is indeed exactly what was going on.  Circumstantial?  Yeah, it is. But here, the circumstances seem persuasive as hell.

    Even so, Clintoon has her       weak-minded sycophants incapable of facing ugly reality      defenders.     Predictably, both Clintoon and her defenders say that occurrences such as these are “coincidental”.

    Yeah, right.  And Al Capone was just a savvy businessman in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, too.

    Clintoon and her cronies might want to remember one thing, though.  Capone didn’t go to jail for racketeering.

    He ended up in prison because investigators “followed the money”.

     

    (Edited to Add:  here’s an article from Yahoo News giving more details.  I don’t recommend you read it immediately after eating.)

     

    Author’s Note:  new or occasional readers may notice the spelling “Clintoon” and assume that is a typographical error.  It is not.  That is intentional.

    In behavior, both famous Clintoons are IMO exemplars of the stereotypical corrupt politician – and are such compelling exemplars that they appear to be near-cartoonish representations of same.  (However, though each is IMO thoroughly corrupted they do appear to be corrupted in different ways.)  Thus, referring to them as “Clintoons” simply seems apropos.

  • More Clintoon “Private” Email Surfaces

    Remember those roughly 30,000 work-related emails on Clintoon’s unsecured private email server?  You know, the ones that were turned over to State for review by Clintoon’s lawyers in 2014?   The batch of emails turned over by Clintoon’s lawyers was supposed to consist of “all of them” – right?

    Well, it turns out that 2014 bunch wasn’t exactly “all of them”.  Rather, it turns out that that first batch of 30,000 was only about 2/3 of the total.

    State Department lawyers confirmed recently that the FBI has uncovered another nearly 15,000 emails sent by or to Clintoon at that “private” address while she was SECSTATE.  This new batch of emails wasn’t previously disclosed.  And they haven’t yet been reviewed.

    State is currently “prioritizing” the appraisal of this new batch of email to see what can be released to the public.

    This story at The Hill has more details.  It’s worth a read.

    Sheesh.  If you or I had pulled this stunt, we’d be in jail awaiting trial.  And we’d have been there for months already.

  • Bissonnette Loses Royalties, Speaking Fees from “No Easy Day”

    As longtime TAH readers know, Matt Bissonnette wrote a book about the takedown of bin Laden called No Easy Day under the pseudonym “Mark Owen”.  It’s been the subject of numerous articles here at TAH (see here and here and here) and has been mentioned in several other related articles.

    Bissonnette ended up in a bit of legal trouble over the book.  While he wasn’t criminally prosecuted, the government took him to court to enforce his nondisclosure agreement.  One of the terms of that nondisclosure agreement is that all profits from any work revealing classified information that is published without appropriate prior review are to be turned over to the government.

    The court suit has now been settled.  Bissonnette will forfeit to the US government all royalties and profits from his book; that amount is already believed to be over $6.6 million.  Within 30 days he will also pony up $100k in speaking fees he received for using slides (apparently based on the same information) that were also not submitted for review prior to public use.

    In short, he’ll do exactly what he agreed he would do when he signed his SF312, Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement.

    IMO, Bissonnette and his original lawyers were idiots – Bissonnette for not complying originally, and his lawyers for letting this drag on for years.  The SF312 is quite clear and unambiguous regarding both post-employment disclosures and the procedures for publishing works that may contain classified information – and it has been for decades.

    Signing a SF312 is required for access to classified information.  Bissonnette signed a SF312 – and probably multiple copies – during his Navy career.

    But I guess the prospect for a 7-figure payday sometimes brings out “teh stoopid” in people.

    And please, spare me the “the government is singling him out to screw him for political reasons” or “he didn’t know” garbage – because that’s bullsh!t.  Bissonnette signed on the dotted line; if he was too stupid to read the document and understand it, that’s on him.

    Besides:  Bissonnette has written a follow-up book entitled No Hero: the Evolution of a Navy SEAL, also under the pseudonym “Mark Owen”.  He submitted that book for the appropriate pre-publication review.  It was approved by DoD with minor redactions.

    Count your blessings, Mattie-boi.  For what you did, it’s entirely possible you could be in jail today vice simply out considerable coin.

  • Monifa Sterling’s BCD upheld

    Monifa Sterling’s BCD upheld

    Monifa Sterling

    The Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces ruled in the case against former Marine Corps Lance Corporal Monifa Sterling who claimed that her supervisor violated her religious rights by making her take down some Bible verses she had posted in her shared workspace.

    Monifa Fox News

    Folks like the Becket Fund and Fox News would have you think that it’s about religious freedom, but a thorough reading of the decision would reveal otherwise. For example, she didn’t reveal to her supervisor that the passages she had on her wall were bible verses. “No weapon formed against me shall prosper” is one that most people wouldn’t recognize;

    SSgt Alexander discovered the signs and ordered Appellant to remove them because “it wasn’t just her desk; it was being shared by the other junior Marine.” According to Appellant, SSgt Alexander said that she wanted the signs removed because she did not like their tone. Nothing in the record indicates that SSgt Alexander knew that the text was Biblical in origin, and the NMCCA found that Appellant never informed SSgt Alexander that the signs had either a religious genesis or any religious significance to Appellant.

    There were other things at issue.

    In August 2013, another of Appellant’s superiors, SSgt Morris, noticed that Appellant was not wearing the proper uniform, and he ordered her to wear “her service uniforms as directed by the Commandant of the Marine Corps.” Ac-cording to SSgt Morris, Appellant refused to obey the order because Appellant said “she had a medical chit out there stating she could not wear the uniform.” SSgt Morris spoke with medical personnel at the base, who stated that Appellant could wear the required uniform, and he again ordered Appellant to change into the proper uniform. Appellant re-fused. SSgt Morris then escorted Appellant to First Sergeant (1stSgt) Robinson, who repeated the order for a third time. Appellant again refused.

    On September 12, 2013, 1stSgt Robinson ordered Appel-lant to report to the Pass and Identification building on Sunday, September 15, 2013, from 4:00 PM until approxi-mately 7:30 PM, to help distribute vehicle passes to families of service members returning from deployment. According to 1stSgt Robinson, Appellant refused on the basis that “she was on medication.” On September 13, 2013, 1stSgt Robin-son informed Major (Maj) Flatley that he was having issues with Appellant.

    Maj Flatley met with Appellant to “talk some sense into her, reason with her, [and] to make sure that she goes to her appointed place of duty on Sunday.” During their conversation, Maj Flatley attempted to hand the vehicle passes to Appellant. According to Maj Flatley, Appellant refused to take the passes and stated that she would not be there and would be sleeping. As a result, Maj Flatley called 1stSgt LaRochelle and directed her to begin writing a charge sheet on Appellant.

    Of course, she didn’t show up to her appointed place of duty, so her leadership applied a Special Court Martial to the situation. It was during her testimony at the Special Court Martial that Sterling revealed that the phrase she’d been ordered to remove was religious in context. Removing the phrase from her shared workspace doesn’t give her a pass for all of the other crap she did.

    Importantly, the NMCCA’s findings that Appellant had a “contentious” relationship with her command, “even prior” to this incident, and that, in that context, posting the words “[n]o weapon formed against me shall prosper” might be “in-terpreted as combative” are also not clearly erroneous. 2015 CCA LEXIS 65, at *19, 2015 WL 832587, at *6 (internal quotation marks omitted). Appellant herself conceded that SSgt Alexander did not like the signs’ tone, and the NMCCA found that Appellant did not tell SSgt Alexander that the signs had a religious connotation.

    From the court’s dissent;

    In my view, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000bb–2000bb-4 (2012), provides the men and women of our nation’s armed forces with the presumptive right to fully, openly, and spontaneously engage in religious exercise. This right extends to sincere religious conduct that is not specifically required by, or deemed by judges to be important to, the tenets of a servicemember’s faith. Further, servicemembers who are court-martialed for sincere religious conduct may invoke the protections afforded by RFRA even if they did not obtain the permission of the Government before engaging in that conduct, and even if they did not contemporaneously inform their chain-of-command that their actions were religious in nature.

    I conclude that the majority’s disposition of the instant case is not consistent with these rights under RFRA. Moreover, I conclude that the majority’s analysis of the underlying legal issue raises the prospect that other servicemembers in the future may be subjected to conviction at court-martial for merely engaging in religious exercise that is entitled to protection under the statute. Therefore, I must respectfully dissent.

    I don’t think that anything she did was religious at all. She was a bad Marine who listened to shit-house lawyers and she got bad advice, and a bad conduct discharge.

    The Becket Fund press release hints that they may take the case to the Supreme Court, but I don’t think they have a leg to stand on.

  • About that San Bernardino “Valor Award” . . . .

    A few weeks ago, Jonn wrote about Irene Martinez – chief of an USICS office in San Bernardino – being nominated to receive the DHS “Award for Valor”.  However, at the time USICS was reluctant to disclose precisely what it was that Ms. Martinez had done to merit nomination to receive the award.

    Well, now we know.  Apparently DHS has finally responded to a FOIA request concerning the matter.

    During the San Bernardino terrorist shootings that occurred about a mile and a half away from her facility, Ms. Martinez first “warned [her] employees to be very careful and to be vigil (sic) about their surroundings”.  While the facility was on lockdown, she then went out to the parking lot and fetched one of her employees who was sitting in his car after returning from lunch, bringing him inside.

    She afterwards “soothed members of the public who were temporarily stranded in the building.”  According to the paperwork nominating her for the DHS Award for Valor, her actions that day “demonstrated not only her professionalism and exceptional leadership, but also her compassion and caring for her employees and the public we serve.”

    Yes, I’m serious.  That’s really why she was nominated.  The material in quotes above are reportedly direct quotes from the award nomination paperwork.

    Now, I don’t know about you – but something strikes me as a bit odd here.  Previous recipients of the same award apparently received the award for actions such as confronting armed criminals, or for rescuing persons from sinking ships or burning cars.  You know, for situations in which actual honest-to-God bravery was required.

    Ms. Martinez, in contrast, was apparently nominated for the award for nothing more than taking those routine actions any supervisor would be expected to take during a facility lockdown.  In short:  she was nominated simply for doing her freaking job.

    Oh, and in case anyone’s forgotten:  Ms. Martinez also apparently has a rather odd view of what consititutes “doing her job”.  It turns out that Ms. Martinez was quite uncooperative when 5 DHS LE personnel came to her facility the next day looking for a person of interest in connection with the previous day’s terrorist shooting.  That person of interest – Enrique Marquez – was believed at the time to have supplied the two terrorist bastards who’d perpetrated the previous day’s attack the weapons they’d used.  Marquez was scheduled for an appointment at Ms. Martinez’s facility, but was a no-show.

    Ms. Martinez delayed those 5 Federal LE agents for approximately 1 1/2 hours in the performance of their duties, apparently for bureaucratic “turf war” reasons.  She then outright lied to DHS IG investigators about her actions that day when the matter was later investigated.

    It seems to me that both of those later actions by Ms. Martinez may well qualify as crimes – the former possibly as interfering with a Federal investigation (18 USC 111, or 18 USC 1512(b)3) and the latter as giving a false statement to Federal investigators (18 USC 1001).  But it doesn’t seem as if anyone at DHS much cares about that.

    But they sure seem to want to give the lady an award for doing nothing more than her job.  Go figure.

  • Clock-Boy Wants to Get Paid

    Remember “Clock boy”, AKA Clachmed?  You know, the Islamic activist’s son who disassembled a 1980s-vintage digital clock and repackaged it into a case large enough to hold a complete M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel mine with room to spare, and took it to school – then set it to alarm in class?  And who did that about 4 months after a couple of terrorist bastards had tried to shoot up a “Draw Mohammed” show a few miles away from his school?

    Well, guess what.  It appears he and his family – who left the US for Qatar last October – have decided they want to get paid.

    Clachmed is currently in the USA for the summer “visiting family and friends”.   I’m sure that it’s “just a coincidence” that while he’s “visiting family and friends” here in the USA, his family has also filed suit against his former school district for “violating his civil rights”.

    Yeah, right.  Can you say, “Fishing for a 7-figure settlement?”  Sure.  I knew you could.

    Sheesh.  All things considered, the young man is lucky as hell.  If he’d pulled that stunt in many if not most places in the world and gotten caught there’s a good chance he’d still be in jail – if not dead.

    I hope the judge who gets this case has enough common sense to toss it with prejudice, and sticks the youngster’s family with attorneys’ fees for both sides.  But I’m not holding my breath.