Hillary Clinton – praag.org

Pressure builds on Hillary to explain emails

As pressure builds on Hillary Clinton to explain her official use of personal email while serving as secretary of state, she faced new complications Tuesday. It was disclosed her top aides are being drawn into a burgeoning federal inquiry and that two emails on her private account have been classified as “Top Secret.”

The inspector general for the Intelligence Community notified senior members of Congress that two of four classified emails discovered on the server Clinton maintained at her New York home contained material deemed to be in one of the highest security classifications – more sensitive than previously known.

The notice came as the State Department inspector general’s office acknowledged that it is reviewing the use of “personal communications hardware and software” by Clinton’s former top aides after requests from Congress.

“We will follow the facts wherever they lead, to include former aides and associates, as appropriate,” said Douglas Welty, a spokesman for the State Department’s inspector general.

The expanding inquiry threatens to further erode Clinton’s standing as the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Since her reliance on private email was revealed in March, polls in crucial swing states show that increasing numbers of voters say Clinton is not honest and trustworthy, in part, because of her use of private emails.

Revelations that dozens of Clinton’s emails now include classified information has prompted an FBI inquiry into whether classified information was improperly stored on her private server and a thumb drive held by her attorney. The news has sparked fear among national security experts that the federal government’s secrets may have been exposed or even hacked.

Source: McClatchy

Trump leads the pack in NC

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump is the leading choice among North Carolina Republican primary voters in a recent US Public Policy Poll. Trump received 16 percent, while former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush received 12 percent.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker came in tied for second with Bush at 12 percent. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was third with 11 percent. Dr. Ben Carson got 9 percent with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) got 7 percent while Se. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) got six percent. Gov. Chris Christie received five percent. Carly Fiorina followed with four percent and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry had two percent.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) had one percent, as did Gov. Bobby Jindal, and former Sen. Rick Santorum. Gov. John Kasich and George Pataki were under one percent.

President Obama carried North Carolina in 2008, but Republican nominee Mitt Romney took it back in 2012.

“Trump’s favorability rating in North Carolina is 55/32, much higher than we were finding in national polls prior to his entry into the race. Trump’s really caught fire with voters on the far right- 66% of ‘very conservative’ voters see him favorably to only 24% with a negative view of him. Trump is polling particularly well with younger voters (29%) and men (20%),” Public Policy Poll (PPP) reported.

Bush had been the leader in the North Carolina polls, but is struggling to get the conservative vote.

Clinton saw a ten-point drop in support from last month’s standing.

“Clinton’s polling over 70% with African Americans, 60% with liberals and women, and 50% with moderates and voters in every age group,” PPP reported, adding she is weaker with white voters and men.

“All of the general election match ups in North Carolina are close with Clinton trailing 5 of the Republican hopefuls, leading 4 of them, and tied with one,” PPP noted.

Source: Breitbart

Trump for President?

Perhaps it has occurred to you as it has to me that the United States is no longer capable of producing political leadership. In the current issue of Trends Journal, Gerald Celente describes the eight candidates (at the time he went to press) for the US presidential nomination as “Liars, cowards, freaks & fools.”

Celente put it well. If you look at the sorry collection that aspires to be the CEO of what continues to be described as the “exceptional, indispensable, most important country with the largest economy and military, the world’s only Superpower, the Uni-power,” you see a collection of nobodies. America is like the last days of Rome when contenting factions fought to put their puppet on the throne.

There is no known politician in America who measures up to Vladimir Putin’s ankle, or to the knee of China’s leaders, or to the waist of Ecuador’s, Bolivia’s, Venezuela’s, Argentina’s, Brazil’s, or to the chests of India’s and South Africa’s.

In Europe, the UK, Australia, and Canada, the natural leaders are also frozen out of the corrupt system.

In the US, “leadership” positions depend on financial support from the ruling economic interests. American presidents and politicians represent about six powerful private interest groups and no one else.

After Celente went to press, Donald Trump announced to much mirth. A “con man” they say, but what else is the President of the United States? Do you think you weren’t conned by Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama? What universe do you live in?

In actual fact, Trump might be our best candidate to date. By all accounts, he is very rich. Thus, he doesn’t need the office in order to become rich by selling out America to interest groups.

By all accounts, Trump has a healthy ego. Thus, he could be capable of standing up to the powerful interest groups that generally determine the governance of the American serfs.

Trump’s ego might even be strong enough for him to stand up to the Israel Lobby, something my former colleague, Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said publicly that no American President was capable of doing.

As Celente makes clear in the current Trends Journal, all politicians are con men or con women. We are going to have them regardless, so why not try a rich one who might decide to break with tradition and serve the interests of the citizenry. This would be a unique accomplishment, affording Trump the elevation in history books that would satisfy his ego. When a person reaches Trump’s state, does he need another couple of billion dollars or is historical recognition as the savior, however temporary, more valuable?

This is not my endorsement of Trump for President. It is merely my speculations on how we might think of how large egos might be brought into our service. When we put the Clintons in office, they decided to make money so that they could outdo Hollywood and show their arrival with the $3 million they spent on their daughter’s wedding.

For Trump, $3 million is pocket change.

The rich are everywhere demonized, but no action follows. So, let’s consider voting for Trump. Some of the better Roman emperors were rich. Their riches allowed them to maintain the stability of the state and to think about its long-run survival. They could outbid the private interests that wished to overthrow them for their own purposes of immediate and highly selective gain.

It would take a lot of money to outbid Trump, although if he neglects the Secret Service and the CIA, he could go the way of John F. and Bobby Kennedy. He would have to make certain he was well protected if he cuts the budget of the military/security complex.

Money, lots of it, has one great virtue. Money in sufficient amounts conveys INDEPENDENCE. Trump, if press reports are correct, has money. This means, if correct, that Trump, unlike every other candidate, has independence from the ruling handful of private interest groups.

If Trump can assemble independent thinkers as his advisers, thus keeping himself out of the hands of the usual interest groups, should he be able to get elected, his administration could succeed in taking America in a more promising direction.

An important question is: can a really rich person find and be comfortable with peers who are not themselves really rich? If not, then Trump is not our man. But if Trump wants to save our country, he has the money and the ego, and he can find enough people to help him.

This opportunity doesn’t mean that it will be seized or that it would pan out. If Trump is our best choice, imagine how deplorable our situation is.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

Clinton plays the race card

Hillary Clinton closed a three-day campaign fundraising swing through Texas and New Mexico on Thursday with a rare public appearance at Texas Southern University in Houston to play the race card on voting rights.

She took no questions and spoke with no reporters, but angrily complained that Texas voters can present their concealed-carry gun permits as a voter ID, but not their college student identification cards.

Clinton was received with wild applause at the historically black college, but organizers arranged the 8,100-seat basketball arena so that three-quarters of the seats were roped off and empty.

They added rows of chairs on the floor, but 15-foot-tall blue curtains draped all around blocked the view of entire sections of empty seats, leaving the impression that Clinton couldn’t fill the room.

The university didn’t provide a crowd count, but an arena security official estimated that there were 2,200 in attendance. Clinton spoke for 31 minutes with the aid of a teleprompter, alleging that ‘hundreds of thousands of registered voters in Texas’ are being disenfranchised by a conspiracy of conservatives who want to freeze out black voters.

And elsewhere, she said, in the Carolinas, election officials have changed the location and open hours of polling places in order to flummox poor and minority voters.

Clinton also complained that state and local officials in southern states have crusaded against early voting plans, same-day voter registration, and pre-registration systems that target 16- and 17-year-olds in high schools.

Changes to voting laws in the South came fast and furious after a 2013 Supreme Court decision that revoked key provisions in the Voting Rights Act.

That law’s ‘special protections,’ as Clinton put it, had forced southern states with histories of discrimination to get permission from the federal government before putting new election laws in place.

Texas moved to amend its voting laws just hours after the decision to end that system was handed down.

Texas Southern, a historically black university, honored Clinton with a public service award named for the late Rep. Barbara Jordan, the first black female member of Congress from the Deep South.

‘She was a staunch advocate for the Voting Rights Act, which had helped make it possible for her to be elected,’ Clinton said Thursday, lamenting that the federal law’s ‘heart has been ripped out’ by America’s most senior jurists.

In the wake of that decision, Clinton said Thursday, Americans have seen a torrent of ‘new laws that make it harder than ever to vote.’

She warned against ‘a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, and young people and poor people from one end of this country to the other.’

Minority communities’ feelings of being especially challenged on Election Day, she said, ‘just didn’t happen by accident. And it is just wrong.’

Americans support voter ID laws, the measures Clinton railed hardest against, by large margins.

In deep-red Texas, according to a University of Texas poll in late 2014, support runs at 3-to-1.

Orlando Watson, the Republican National Committee’s communications director for black media, fired a broadside at her following the speech.

‘Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric is misleading and divisive,’ Watson said. ‘In reality, the vast majority of Americans – including minority voters – support commonsense measures to prevent voter fraud.’

‘Clinton’s shameless attacks ignore the fact her Democrat-led home state of New York does not allow early voting while dozens of Republican-led states do. Her exploitation of this issue only underscores why voters find her dishonest and untrustworthy.’

It was also revealed that Clinton’s charity accepted a substantial donation from an anti-gay African church which has likened homosexuals to the Devil.

The 2016 Presidential candidate took money for her sprawling health nonprofit from the Cameroon Baptist Convention whose official policy is that being gay ‘contradicts God’s purpose for human sexuality’.

The devout Christian organization has in the past compared being gay to committing incest and human trafficking. Its leaders have also railed against US attempts to promote gay rights in Cameroon.

Despite this, the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Board gave between $1million and $10million between 2010 and this year, according to the latest list of donors from the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

Source: Daily Mail

Clinton funds conflict in Syria, Baltimore and now South Africa

The Hillary Clinton Diaspora Foundation supports the homecomingrevolution.com in South Africa. Their spokesperson Angel Jones is a Board Member of Roedean School. This private English school, one of the oldest and most expensive Anglican institutions in South Africa, features prominently in the attacks against Afrikaans schools.

The previous white ANC education MEC, Barbara Creecy – also from Roedean – has served as the instigator of the ongoing schools conflict since 2009. Creecy was appointed as the new finance MEC in 2014.

She is currently “advising” Panyaza Lesufi, her follower and some say puppet, on the English take-over of Afrikaans schools.

Creecy says on her bio she “used her journalism skills in ANC underground structures”. The terrorist underground of the ANC waged a bombing campaign against civilians before they were unbanned.

Jones, a friend of Creecy’s, was invited to Morning Live on SABC2 on Wednesday where she repeated Creecy’s goals and openly stated that Afrikaans schools should be anglicized as soon as possible.

Jones makes the nonsense claim that she, as a British passport holder, belonged to the “African diaspora” in Britain. She also misspells “Hillary” as “Hilary” on the “fact sheet” of her organisation.

Hillary Clinton’s foundation funds “diaspora communities” to “offer the benefits of the ‘brain gain,’” Clinton said at the opening ceremony of the second annual Global Diaspora Forum in 2012.

The homecomingrevoltion.com in South Africa promotes the “African brain gain“.

Speaking to about 500 diaspora community leaders, advocates and senior US officials in 2012, Clinton cited the support of Syrian Americans and organizations as an example of how the Syrian diaspora serves as a link to support “opposition activists” in the war-torn Syria.

Most of the “opposition activists” in Syria today are members of ISIS, who behead “infidels”.

Clinton’s funding is hardly an advertisement for Creecy, Jones and their ilk. At the meeting in 2012 Clinton also praised the ways that immigrant communities have revitalized American cities like Baltimore, Md.

In only two short years Baltimore exploded into racial strife and animosity, raising fears that meddling by the Clintons may lead to open conflict.

Destroying Libya for profit

While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Sydney Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials.

During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Much of the Libya “intelligence” that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government.

The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the “ground floor” of the new Libyan economy.

The projects — creating floating hospitals to treat Libya’s war wounded and temporary housing for displaced people, and building schools — would have required State Department permits, but foundered before the business partners could seek official approval.

It is not clear whether Mrs. Clinton or the State Department knew of Mr. Blumenthal’s interest in pursuing business in Libya; a State Department spokesman declined to say. Many aspects of Mr. Blumenthal’s involvement in the planned Libyan venture remain unclear. He declined repeated requests to discuss it.

But interviews with his associates and a review of previously unreported correspondence suggest that — once again — it may be difficult to determine where one of Mr. Blumenthal’s jobs ended and another began.

A series of memos from Mr. Blumenthal — who was not an employee of the State Department — to Mrs. Clinton about events unfolding in Libya before and after the death of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, have been obtained by The New York Times.

Mrs. Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, took Mr. Blumenthal’s advice seriously, forwarding his memos to senior diplomatic officials in Libya and Washington and at times asking them to respond. Mrs. Clinton continued to pass around his memos even after other senior diplomats concluded that Mr. Blumenthal’s assessments were often unreliable.

Source: NYT

Ilana Mercer: Savoring Hillary’s Vow Of Silence

The national media are sulking. Hillary Clinton won’t speak to them. But what is it about this power-hungry dirigista that the media don’t already know?

Prior to taking a vow of silence, Mrs. Clinton promised to make President Obama’s legislation by executive action with respect to immigration seem like child’s play; a “DREAMers” delight, if you will.

Where’s the mystery there?

Big Media know full-well about—and have just about forgiven—Madam Secretary’s habit of conducting state affairs via private server, later scrubbed clean of unflattering or incriminating communications.

The same press corps knows that the Clinton Foundation, in which Mrs. Clinton is mired, is awash in funds from foreign governments and likely beholden to these patrons. Those so inclined can check out Charity Navigator. For all its billions, the Clinton Foundation doesn’t rate a mention by the eminent Charity rating service. “In 2013, a measly 9 percent of the money went to charity!” “Repulsive,” avers John Stossel.

Making community college “free” was another of Hillary’s brain infarcts, voiced in Monticello, Iowa, in March this year. “There’s something deeply wrong about students and their families needing to go into debt to finance a college education” were Mrs. Clinton’s semantic strokes of genius, disgorged during her first meet-and-greet, with members of the press (mainly).

What’s there to miss?

Didn’t we have The Same Talk (in the same place) back in April of 2012, about America’s next financial bubble in search of a pin, the $1 trillion student-loan debt? Campaigning in Iowa, Obama promised America’s miseducated Millennials to keep the student-loan bubble from bursting. During his State of the Union address of January 2012, Barry Soetoro Frankenstein vowed to mandate yet more loans at fixed prices.

When it comes, will the media react with wonderment at Hillary’s “fresh” take on educational central planning and price fixing?

Not content with acquiring wealth through the dishonest, predatory process of politics (to contrast with the honest, productive, economic means of earning a living)—Hillary Clinton and husband have protected their ill-gotten gains from the taxman through trusts. These are “common among multimillionaires, and help shield some of their estate from the [inheritance] tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.” “Among the tax advantages of such trusts,” attests BloombergBusiness, “is that any appreciation in the [asset’s] value can happen outside their taxable estate. The move could save the Clintons hundreds of thousands of dollars in estate taxes. …”

The height of Hillary’s hypocrisy, however, is that while she shields her own fortune from it, she recommended, during her last campaign, that estate taxes be further raised on Americans who’ve managed to amass more than $3.5 million.

“… Clinton supported making wealthier people pay more estate tax by capping the per-person exemption at $3.5 million and setting the top rate at 45 percent, a policy Obama still supports. Congress decided to go in the other direction and Obama went along as part of a broader compromise. The per-person exemption is now $5.34 million.”

A “wealth tax” is how Clinton has characterized the estate tax.

Clinton’s express “inspiration” as a future president is to “ensure that granddaughter Charlotte and her generation are provided equal opportunities to live up to their potential.” She said as much in April.

How do you imagine that will be accomplished, if not by the use of every illiberal power-tool in the leftist toolbox? Taking by force from some to give to others, creating new, unelected, oppressive agencies to carry out the new potentate’s plans, raising armies to march on uncompliant nations, on and on.

Hillary Clinton and her armory of future, repressive laws should be properly dubbed illiberal (stupid, too).

“A ‘rationale’ for running,” gushed one particular tele-tart named Poppy Harlow. She was raving about Mrs. Clinton’s “brilliant” plans to weave her tangled web for Charlotte.

To say you want to be president for the good of your granddaughter’s generations is not a rationale. Rather, it’s of a piece with the standard statement made by the low-IQ beauty queen: “I want to make the world a better place.” Except that a pretty girl with no ship-of-state to steer is far more likely to spread peace and happiness than a power-hungry, illiberal, brutal battle-axe like Hillary Clinton.

If only a woman with the wicked wit of a Margot Asquith—countess of Oxford, author and socialite (1864- 1945)—were around to put slobbering Poppy Harlow in her proper place.

When asked by American actress Jean Harlow how she pronounces her first name, Mrs. Asquith quickly retorted: “The ‘t’ is silent, as in Harlow.”

For now, let us savor the silence from Hillary and her media harlots.

**
Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S. She is a contributor to Junge Freiheit, Germany’s finest weekly, and is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com. Follow her on Twitter. “Friend” her on Facebook.

Blue chip companies pull back from Clintons

An Exxon Mobil spokesman said this week that the company has decided not to be involved in the Clinton Global Initiative this year. The oil company said its decision was unrelated to recent scrutiny of the foundation, but this is the first year it has not been a sponsor since 2009. Other sponsors, including Monsanto, are reevaluating their partnerships.

Some blue-chip companies that have long provided large donations to the Clinton Foundation are pulling back or reassessing their support.

Bill and Chelsea Clinton are convening foreign leaders here at a lush golf resort set in a palm grove this week to showcase their foundation’s charitable work. But the conference also highlights new controversies engulfing the Clinton family’s vast philanthropic enterprises as Hillary Rodham Clinton begins her presidential campaign.

A liberal human rights organization and several Republican lawmakers, for instance, are criticizing the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation for accepting donations from a Moroccan government-owned mining company, whose seven-figure sponsorship of this week’s gathering came amid growing scrutiny of foreign-government contributions to the charity.

This week’s flashy Morocco conference — a first-ever Africa and Middle East spinoff of the flagship CGI held each September in New York — underscores the foundation’s controversial fundraising practices, which have become a potential anchor on Hillary Clinton’s nascent campaign.

Source: Washington Post

Hillary blames ‘mass incarceration’ for Baltimore

Hillary Clinton blames “mass incarceration” of blacks for the riots in Baltimore. She called for a re-evaluation of prison sentences.

Hillary Clinton called on Wednesday for broad criminal-justice reform, reflecting the former First Lady’s evolution from supporting the policies instituted by her husband two decades ago in a period of high crime rates.

Clinton called for body cameras in every police department in the country, as well as an end to an “era of mass incarceration.” Her speech came two days after the funeral in Baltimore of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died while in police custody, and amidst ongoing civil unrest in that city.

“There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are far more likely to be stopped by the police and charged with crimes and given longer prison terms than their white counterparts,” Clinton said. “There is something wrong when trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve breaks down … We must urgently begin to rebuild bonds of trust and respect among American between police and citizens.”

Clinton offered few specific policy plans in the speech, and didn’t explain how police forces would pay for body cameras on all officers. She spoke broadly about reducing jail sentences for low-level offenders and the effects of imprisoning millions, particular African Americans. “We don’t want to create another incarceration generation,” Clinton said.

Policing experts who reconstructed the events of the day said that Baltimore police did not send enough officers to the situation at the start, failed to quickly make arrests once trouble began and did not deploy additional officers quickly enough.

Key decisions led the situation to spiral out of control in a short 90 minutes, a lesson other police departments should heed.

Source: Time

Clinton’s African adventure

On their nine-day trip to Africa, Bill and Chelsea Clinton are traveling with 20 wealthy donors and supporters, some of whom have also been fundraising for Hillary’s presidential bid and others who are expected to give big to her campaign.

The opportunity to accompany Bill Clinton on trips across the globe on behalf of his philanthropic foundation for years has been considered both a reward for past donations and an inducement for future giving, say sources familiar with the foundation’s finance operation. This time, they say, it was an especially coveted invite that was extended to wealthy Clinton supporters — including those who are also expected to give generously to Hillary’s campaign.

The foundation, which provided POLITICO with the list of donors on the trip, said the group represents both longtime supporters as well as those who are just getting involved and provides an opportunity to see the projects they are contributing to.

Among those along for the ride, which began yesterday: Democrat Jay Jacobs and his wife, Mindy, longtime Clinton fundraisers and foundation supporters; billionaire CEO Lynn Forester de Rothschild; Washington lobbyist Liz Robbins, who in the past has hosted events for the Clintons at her East Hampton home; wealthy Ugandan Rumi Verjee, who made his fortune franchising Domino’s Pizza in England; and John and Rebecca MacKay, who have donated between $5 and $10 million to the foundation.

The labor movement might not yet be ready for Hillary, but Hillary is ready to start wooing labor. In an email sent out Tuesday to labor organizers by political director Amanda Renteria and obtained by POLITICO, the Clinton campaign announced it has hired Nikki Budzinski, former national labor coordinator at the UFCW, as its labor outreach director.

The announcement came the same day that the country’s most powerful union leader, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, delivered a much-publicized speech with the message that organized labor isn’t ready to endorse Hillary just yet.

Renteria said that filling the labor outreach post “has been a top priority for us given the importance of labor issues to Hillary and everyday Americans across the country. I also know that Hillary and so many of us here already have long-standing relationships within the labor community, and we’re looking forward to maintaining and growing those relationships as a team.” Budzinski will join the campaign on May 15, the email said.

The Clintons received millions from Ukranian oligarch

During Hilary Clinton’s tenure as US Secretary [of State] up to 2013, grants to the tune of tens of millions of dollars flowed from Viktor Pinchuk, one of the richest Ukrainian oligarchs, to the Clinton Global Initiative. The goal of the fundraising was to make the Ukraine a “successful, free and modern country on the basis of European values”. Shortly thereafter, the country broke apart.

Viktor Pinchuk has excellent contacts. Not only is the Ukrainian steel magnate number 54 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world, the Pinchuks’ family connections are also in evidence. Thus in 2002 the multi-billionaire married Elena Kuchma, daughter of the second Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, who held office from 1994 to 2005. Among the areas of responsibility of Kuchma included the privatisation of Kryvorizhstals, the largest steel plant in Ukraine. The buyer of the company was the Interpipe Group, which in turn is part owned by Kuchma’s son-in-law Pinchuk. The purchase price was about one-sixth of the company’s actual value.

Various other start-ups and the acquisition of four Ukrainian TV channels characterised Pinchuk’s business activity over the following years. The empire was ultimately rounded off with the establishment of the “Pinchuk Foundation”, which claims to be the largest “philanthropic foundation” of Ukraine. No charitable activities on the part of the Foundation, however, have ever been documented.

The Pinchuk Foundation made up for it by being more active in the international arena. Already in 2007 the first payments of around 5 million dollars flowed to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s Global Initiative, which picturesquely describes their foundation’s purpose as “gathering global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to the most pressing challenges facing the world”. De facto, however, the Foundation can be considered in terms of an international support network for the political career of Hillary Clinton.

From 2008, Pinchuk committed to a further 29 million US dollar donation to the Clinton Global Initiative, split over five years. In this way, funds from the Ukrainian steel magnate flowed directly across the Atlantic to the accounts of the Clintons during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as US Secretary of State during the Obama Administration of 2009-2013, as a report in the Wall Street Journal has recently lain bare.

While the Clintion Foundation officially accepts no funds from foreign governments, during the period in which Hillary Clinton led the US State Department, the doors to financial benefits were on the rebound, as in the Pinchuks case, obviously always wide open. This also raises the question of direct influence over the US government through interest groups from Ukrainian big capital circles in the immediate vicinity of the EU.

The stated aim of the donation in the order of tens of millions of dollars may have been, as the Pinchuk Foundation claims, to “establish a successful, free and modern country, based on European values.” It’s a choice of words that may carry a pleasant connotation; however, a seasoned observer of transatlantic geopolitics is unlikely to expect any good to come of it.

In November 2013, Ukraine entered a phase of domestic instability, which eventually led to the overthrow of the Ukrainian President Yanukovych following his refusal to sign the EU Association Agreement. As a result, the country was plunged into civil war.

Viktor Pinchuk continues to run successful businesses in Ukraine and Hillary Clinton is on course to run for the highest office in the 2016 US Presidential elections. She can be assured of the strong financial support of the Pinchuk Group.

Meanwhile there’s no going back to email from Hillary’s Secretary of State days beyond the 30,490 messages on the record, or roughly half of what the server held during the period. In short, she has effectively wiped her dealings with the likes of Pinchuk clean. Officials now have to take it on faith that Clinton followed the letter of the law and delivered all the messages related to her political life.

Translated from German RT

All the president’s women (well, almost)

Barack Obama’s liberal utopians, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, lied the country into bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who had done nothing to the U.S.

The polls and the pundits are cut up about a breach or two in the White House’s formidably protected perimeter. The People should not be. Working for government ought to be one of the most dangerous jobs ever. Thomas Jefferson, a real prince among men, traveled on horseback and wore plain clothes. Not only was he unguarded, his house in Washington was open to all-comers. Anyone who wrote to Jefferson received a reply in the great man’s hand. He paid for postage out of pocket. Never again will a Jefferson occupy the People’s House. But occupational hazard might just get us a better class of parasite.

In any event, the latest security breach at the White House – there have been many under departing Secret Service Director Julia Pierson – saw 42-year-old Omar J. Gonzalez rush across the lawn and into the first family’s residence, where the trespasser was “confronted by a female Secret Service agent, whom he [naturally] overpowered.” No wonder Pierson and the press have circled the wagons. The same lady officer, or another with a similar skill set, had also failed to lock the front door. Disarmed, too, was an alarm meant to alert officers to intruders.

All in all, officers on-duty stood down, and an off-duty officer manned up. (The canine unit, sick of eating Michelle Obama’s carrots, was busy digging for bones.) Gonzales could have bounded up the stairs to the first family’s living quarters had the off-duty officer not tackled him. He must be male. Were he a woman, or something in-between, he’d be up for a medal of honor.

It’s always good to see gender set-asides and affirmative action – in particular, the delusion that women are just as qualified as men to be soldiers, security guards, firefighters and cops – hurt those who inflict it on non-believers.

As for Pierson, like other ciphers in skirts (or pantsuits) promoted by this administration, she is something else – but nothing like stumblebum Marie Harf, the sibilant spokeswoman at the State Department.

Watching Miley Cyrus’s hootchy hoopla is less offensive than enduring a press conference with Ms. Barf, where reasonably intelligent, veteran newsmen attempt to engage this schoolmarmish, tartish young woman in reasoned repartee. Marie Barf is intellectually inconsequential, to put it kindly. Only the other day did she claim, most memorably – and from the safety of her perch – that the outsourcing, in Benghazi, of the safety of American diplomats to the enemy, a local Muslim militia, is justified because it is part of the protocol. The militia hired to protect the compound was late to the scene, possibly complicit in the carnage.

Another exhibit is Lois Lerner. She “is toxic,” conceded Politico, before segueing into a puff piece about this corrupt kleptocrat. The central conceit of the Politico exposé, “Lerner Breaks Silence,” is that she’s a “complicated figure.” The characterization doesn’t jibe with the main character’s actions and demeanor. Lerner is, in fact, consistently one-dimensional. An example: The Treasury inspector general determined that Lerner’s IRS division used “inappropriate criteria … to identify tax-exempt applications for review,” and that certain organizations applying for tax-exempt status, singled out for their “policy positions,” were harassed for “significant amounts of information.” Translated from bureaucratese, Lerner used a vast, oppressive apparatus – the Internal Revenue Service – to hound right-leaning nonprofits, threaten their mission and menace their donors.

In particular, this bloodhound instructed her elite Unit (Determinations U) to BOLO (Be On the Look Out) for tea-party or 9/12 patriots. The IG made his recommendations. Lerner fobbed him off. The Office of Audit grumbled that it does not believe the “alternative corrective action” proposed by the Lerner division “fully addresses” the problems: “We do not consider the concerns in this report to be resolved.” Befitting the flat, uncomplicated, venal personality she is, Lerner showed no commitment to correct her agency’s ways. Post resignation, lippy Lerner remains unrepentant. “I am not sorry for anything I did,” she declared breezily to Politico.

Signally unsuccessful as head of the General Services Administration was Martha Johnson. (Like IRS top officials, she, too, was in-and-out of the White House.) On YouTube, taxpayers watched Johnson’s jolly bureaucrats having a whale of a time at their expense. Chins, butts and guts wiggling obscenely, the grotesque GSA training conferees stayed in lavish spa resort casinos, as detailed in a damning Office-of-Inspector-General report.

In selecting resorts in which to party, our corpulent public servants conducted “dry runs” and “scouting trips” to destinations like the Ritz-Carlton. Also underwritten by taxpayers were assorted team-building exercises, a bicycle-building project, for one. The OIG lists corrupt contracting practices, a miscellany of employee misconduct, including excessive and impermissible expenditure on luxury suites at Nevada’s M Resort, on 1,000 sushi rolls at $7 apiece and on “$6,325 on commemorative coins ‘rewarding’ all conference participants.”

These are but some of the president’s women – not even the heavy hitters. Barack Obama’s liberal utopians, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, lied the country into bombing and killing Libyan soldiers who had done nothing to the U.S.

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‘Left’ and ‘Right’ bamboozling you on Benghazi

by Ilana Mercer

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“Us against al-Qaida”: This has been—still is—the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that played out in the Benghazi affair, in which the American mission was left undefended, resulting in the slaughter of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans (who, given the pecking order in the Empire, generally go unnamed).

Hillary Clinton, the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom at the time, had clearly resolved to run the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, as one would an open community center. This was meant to signal that her war on Libya had been a success, when in fact Hillary’s adventure there had as much “host-nation support” as George Bush’s faith-based forays into Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indeed, “a central figure in the attack,” reports David D. Kirkpatrick of the New York Times, “was an eccentric, malcontent militia leader, Ahmed Abu Khattala.” Once persecuted and imprisoned by Gadhafi, Abu Khattala is a Libyan Islamist from the el-Leithi region, who considers “the United States not far behind Col. Gadhafi on his list of infidel enemies.”

Understandably, Fox-News neocons have been fuming over “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” Kirkpatrick’s exposé in the Times. In their focused blindness, Republicans believe religiously that, to quote Kirkpatrick, “Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by al-Qaida to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before.” Accordingly, the Obama administration has been “covering up evidence of al-Qaida’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.”

Uncovered by The Times’ investigation, however, was a very different reality in Benghazi—”murkier than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi,” contends Kirkpatrick, “was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.”

In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the findings that “turned up no evidence that al-Qaida or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault,” and that “the attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Col. Gadhafi.”

How can that be? Easily: The history of Libya is festooned with similar ransacking and burning of consulates by angry local mobs. Alas, in the ignorance it cultivates about the past, America is Cicero’s perpetual child. By the definition of the great Roman statesman, “Not to know what happened before one was born is to be always a child.”

Based on the annals of U.S. intervention in the region, it is fair to say that, to the extent the American-made video lampooning Islam triggered the hatred harbored by the invaded Libyans for the invading Americans—to that extent it is true that the YouTube clip, more so than the mythical al Qaida, was a catalyst for the attack on our embassy in Benghazi.

Still, the NYT has hardly been unsparingly honest. Rather, the Gray Eminence is as dishonest and politically provincial as the opposing faction.

Discounted in the Kirkpatrick essay is that al Qaida has devolved into many decentralized operations that mirror the aspirations of the indigenous population to be free of meddling Westerners—unless of course said militia and tribesmen (the Ansar al-Shariah, for example) can get us to bankroll their Baksheesh economy.

Predictably, the double-crossing neoconservative and neoliberal entities cross-pollinate each other.

So wrong was the Times on Iraq that the reporter who piped lies straight from the Bush White House to her Times readers was recruited to Fox News: She is Judith “Chalabi” Miller. (Ahmed Chalabi was the Iraqi exile who agitated for American intervention in Iraq. In the ramp-up to war, Chalabi fed Ms. Miller, the New York Times’ birdbrain now perched at Fox News, with the pro-invasion “intelligence” she then presented to the public.)

The facts in the Benghazi affair have likewise been unwoven and retied into two contradictory narratives to suit the respective sides.

Think of lab rats racing through a maze, as you watch the sub-intelligent, dual-panel “dialogue” conducted on the teli. Hosts Stephanie Cutter (left-wing, social-democratic rat) and S. E. Cupp (right-wing, social-democratic rat): Each rat runs with a designated, neatly bifurcated (Republican or Democratic) political orthodoxy. Each is a “maze-bright” rat, and not the possessor and giver of any truth.

“Left” and “right” are bamboozling you on Benghazi.

Hillary polarizing racial politics

Hillary Clinton began her 2016 march to the White House last week, and it wasn’t a promising debut. The former first lady and Senator used her first big policy speech since leaving the State Department to portray American election laws as fundamentally racist. The speech was longer on anecdotes than statistics, so allow us to fill in some of the holes.

“In 2013, so far, more than 80 bills restricting voting rights have been introduced in 31 states,” Mrs. Clinton told her political base of lawyers at the American Bar Association. She portrayed these laws as part of an effort reaching back years to “disproportionately impact African-Americans, Latino and young voters.” And she threw the Supreme Court in as part of this racist conspiracy, assailing its recent decision finding the “preclearance” section of the Voting Rights Act to be unconstitutional.

She claimed the High Court had “struck at the heart” of the law, though all it did was eliminate a section that had forced such states as Mississippi to meet higher legal burdens for election laws than other states with a worse current record of minority voter participation. “Now not every obstacle is related to race,” Mrs. Clinton added, “but anyone who says that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention.”

No one thinks racial discrimination has vanished from American life or the human condition. But as for minority voting, Mrs. Clinton is the one who hasn’t been paying attention. In particular, she must have missed the May 2013 Census Bureau study on “The Diversifying Electorate—Voting Rates by Race and Hispanic Origin in 2012 (and Other Recent Elections).”

The study, based on data from the November 2012 Current Population Survey, shows that minority voter turnout nationwide has been rising—dramatically so. Take blacks, who as recently as 1996 had a low voter turnout rate of 53%.

As the nearby chart shows, black turnout has jumped in each of the last four presidential elections. In 2012, black turnout as a share of all eligible voters exceeded the turnout of non-Hispanic white voters—66.2% to 64.1%. Nearly five million more African-Americans voted in 2012 (17.8 million) than voted in 2000 (12.9 million). In both 2008 and 2012, black voters even exceeded their share of the eligible black voting age population. In 2012, blacks made up 12.5% of the eligible electorate but 13.4% of those voting.

Having Barack Obama at the top of the ticket no doubt helped this black voter mobilization, but the trend shows that the surge preceded his candidacy. Remember when liberals portrayed Bill Clinton as “America’s first black President”? The black turnout surge accelerated after Mr. Clinton’s last election. Such a large increase in black voter turnout over 16 years would seem to refute the claim by Mrs. Clinton that racial obstacles to voting are increasing.

Mrs. Clinton ignores all of this and focuses instead on anecdotes, while raising alarm about the voter ID laws that have passed in the last decade. She specifically raises fears about North and South Carolina. Yet the same Census Bureau study shows that black turnout exceeded non-Hispanic white turnout by statistically significant rates in both Carolinas, and was higher in most states east of the Mississippi River outside of New England.

North Carolina, she says, has this year “pushed through a bill that reads like the greatest hits of voter suppression.” But that supposed horror show merely reduces early voting by a week, and bars same-day registration and extending voting hours by political whim. All of these are designed to preserve ballot integrity, which is as vital as voter access to public confidence in honest elections. Voters without an ID can get one free at the Department of Motor Vehicles and they can also cast a provisional ballot pending confirmation that they are legally registered.

By the way, Georgia, Indiana and Tennessee have some of the strictest voter ID laws of the more than 30 states that have such laws, yet the Census report says black turnout exceeded that of non-Hispanic whites in 2012 in all three. Where is the evidence that voter ID laws keep minorities from voting?

The disconnect between these facts and Mrs. Clinton’s assertions suggests that she is the one playing racial politics. The current narrow Democratic majority is largely a coalition based on gender and racial identity. It requires big turnout among single women and non-whites. As the Obama era winds down, the fear among Democrats is that these voters won’t have the same enthusiasm.

Mrs. Clinton can play the “first woman President” card, but she also needs large minority turnout. If she can’t motivate that turnout based on rising economic optimism or opportunity, which is hard given the Obama economic record, she and Democrats will play to racial fears to drive it. She wants a racially polarized electorate.

This is a tragedy for the country, and Republicans like Mitt Romney share the blame for doing so little to attract minority votes. But this strategy and Mrs. Clinton’s speech don’t bode well for a less polarized politics as Democrats try to extend their electoral dominance.

Mrs. Clinton billed her speech last week as the first of a series addressing what she called “eroding public trust” in government. Government could use the help, though note the irony that Mrs. Clinton’s party has been running the government even as its reputation sinks. In any case, stoking racial fears based on imaginary government racism won’t make Americans feel better about politics or government.

A version of this article appeared August 19, 2013, on page A16 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Hillary’s Racial Politics.