Hillary's Emails and CENTCOM's Manipulated Intelligence -- America Is Starting to Feel Like Erdogan's Turkey

Since Hillary Clinton is running for an Obama third term, there are two stories that should be headline news right now. But, of course, the mainstream media isn't interested in showing Barack's dirty linens. So, we will. ~~~~~~ TheHill reported Thursday morning that a House Republican task force has concluded that key military intelligence was manipulated to paint an unrealistically optimistic picture of the United States’ fight against ISIS. The report finds that intelligence assessments out of the Pentagon’s Central Command (CENTCOM) differed from on-the-ground conclusions, according to Representative Mike Pompeo, a member of the task force. Pompeo told CBS on Thursday morning : "The facts on the ground didn't match what the intelligence was saying out of the United States Central Command. There's enormous evidence about how this information from talented career professionals inside the analytic arm at CENTCOM did their job and accurately depicted what was going on on the ground. But when it got to very senior levels, that information was changed.” CBS said that the task force did not find evidence that orders to manipulate intelligence were directed from the White House. Contrary to the CBS assessment, last year, dozens of intelligence analysts reportedly complained that their assessments about the group were either repressed or manipulated to make US efforts appear more effective than they were, and House Republicans on the Armed Services, Intelligence and Appropriations Committees opened an investigation last December. The complaints were relayed to the Pentagon’s inspector general, which has also opened an investigation into the matter. The House report findings appear to confirm the prior leaks and reports about the political rewriting of military intelligence. It is irrelevant whether proof exists that the White House asked for overly optimistic reports from CENTCOM to match the Obama public line that the war against ISIS was going well and that the US and its coalition were winning. The task force report will be extremely damaging to the Obama administration -- and for Obama's anointed successor, Hillary Clinton. President Obama was elected in 2008 in part because of his solid opposition to the war in Iraq, which he said was built upon faulty intelligence about Baghdad acquiring weapons of mass destruction. His 2008 position was very appealing to the left of the Democrat Party. We can guess that Obama spokespeople will say that they were lured into the same Iraq trap -- but it is much more likely to have been an Obama White House effort to manipulate military intelligence for political purposes. This makes suspect every claim Obama and his national security advisors have made about the international fight against ISIS and other extremists. The Obama administration has frequently heralded the military gains against ISIS, even as daily news offered images and reports of ISIS expanding its operations around the world. ~~~~~~ The second key story that is getting very little mainstream attention is the Newsmax report that the FBI asked the Justice Department earlier this year to investigate the Clinton Foundation, but DOJ declined. The report is also on CNN.com where the FBI request is mentioned but buried far down in the CNN report on recently released emails from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The news was also reported by The Daily Caller. According to CNN, the Justice Department's public integrity unit turned down the FBI's request because it had looked at opening a case on the Clinton Foundation a year earlier but had not found enough evidence to proceed. But a batch of previously unreleased Clinton emails were made public Tuesday by Judicial Watch. As reported in yesterday's blog, the emails raised questions about ties between Clinton's State Department and the foundation run by her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton. The emails showed Clinton's State Department aides apparently trying to put foundation donors in contact with officials at the State Department. The Daily Caller noted that the latest report showing that DOJ refused to allow an FBI investigation into the ties between the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton State Department could raise more questions about the impartiality of Attorney General Loretta Lynch's Justice Department. She already has taken heat for a private meeting with Bill Clinton just days before Hillary Clinton was questioned by the FBI over the email probe that looked into whether her use of a private server for official business might have compromised national security. The Daily Caller also cited previous reports that Hillary Clinton is considering keeping Lynch as Attorney General if she wins the presidency. Whether Bill delivered this message-as-bribe to AG Lynch on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport is unknown. ~~~~~~ In any event, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus demanded Wednesday that the State Department release thousands of recovered emails from Hillary Clinton's private server before the November election as concerns grow about the agency's ties to Clinton's family foundation. Priebus was referring to emails among those released Tuesday by Judicial Watch. They were originally recovered in the FBI's criminal investigation into Clinton's private email use and turned over to the State Department. Priebus said : "With growing evidence of pay-to-play relationships between Clinton's State Department and her family foundation, the State Department owes it to the American people to release the thousands of work-related emails she failed to turn over before voters head to the polls. Clinton has repeatedly looked in the eyes of the American people and lied to their face in order to hide her unethical and reckless conduct as Secretary of State while furthering her own self-interest." The emails released this week by Judicial Watch were not among the estimated 30,000 emails that Clinton turned over to the agency two years ago. The State Department is considering withholding them until after the November 8 election -- it was this that prompted Priebus to demand their release before the election. Some of these emails showed contacts between State Department aide Huma Abedin and donors to the Clinton Foundation and other political campaigns -- see yesterday's blog. Priebus challenged Hillary and the State Department : "If the State Department continues to withhold these emails, Hillary Clinton should demand they be released, or release them herself. Anything less than a full release of these public records before voting begins will only further prove that we have a rigged system that has one set of rules political elites and another for everyone else. Our country cannot afford further erosion of the public's faith in our institutions because of the unseemly and deep collusion between the Obama administration and their anointed successor, Hillary Clinton." ~~~~~~ Donald Trump's campaign said Tuesday that the latest release of Hillary Clinton's emails from her private server proved the Democratic presidential candidate viewed "public office as nothing more than a means to personal enrichment." Stephen Miller, Trump's national policy director, said : "This is yet more evidence that Hillary Clinton lacks the judgment, character, stability and temperament to be within 1,000 miles of public power. She views public office as nothing more than a means to personal enrichment -- and every dollar she takes comes at the expense of the public welfare." Miller added : "This latest finding is an unseemly, disturbing window into a corrupt office," Miller said, "and yet more evidence that Hillary Clinton has been lying from the beginning -- and by any reasonable definition attempted to obstruct the investigation of the FBI." ~~~~~~ There is LATE BREAKING NEWS on both Hillary's emails and the CENTCOM report. ~~~~~~ Late on Thursday, Newsmax reported that the inspector general for the intelligence community determined last year that classified data in emails on Hillary Clinton private server might have been "compromised" and shared with "a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power." Newsmax quoted two secret letters the FBI sent to the State Department. The FBI letters reveal for the first time that the agency's investigation into Clinton's private email use resulted from a "Section 811" referral from the inspector general, according to Vice News, an online news outlet that obtained the letters under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Under the Intelligence Authorization Act of 1995, Section 811 "is the statutory authority that governs the coordination of counterespionage investigations between executive branch departments or agencies and the FBI." Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, told Vice News that a Section 811 referral is : "a report to the FBI about any unauthorized information that may have been disclosed to a foreign power...whenever there is a compromise of classified information -- for whatever reason....It could include espionage, but it could also include negligence, inadvertence, or something else. Aftergood said : "Section 811 does not assert a violation of criminal law." FBI Director James Comey said that it was possible that "hostile actors gained access" to Clinton's emails, since she had "extensively" used her personal email while traveling abroad. But Comey added that the FBI did not find "direct evidence" that Clinton's private server "was successfully hacked." The letters sent by the FBI to the State Department were dated Oct. 23, 2015, and Jan. 20, 2016, and marked "for official use only," Vice News reports. They were written by Peter Strzok and Charles Kable IV, who head the FBI's counterespionage section. They were sent to Gregory Starr, the Assistant Secretary at the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security. They were written during the FBI's investigation into Clinton's private server use. Vice News reports that in the October letter, Kable wrote : "The potential compromise was identified when, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the US Department of State (DoS) and the ICIG reviewed electronic mail (email) communications from the private email accounts previously used by a former Secretary of State during her tenure at DoS. An initial review of this material identified emails containing national security information later determined by the US Intelligence Community to be classified up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information Level." Kable had asked Starr to review a DVD the FBI had sent containing the emails and to review the classification statue of the communications, Vice News reports. He also asked that the State Department "de-conflict" its response with any other review requests that it had received from other government agencies, according to the report. ~~~ Also late on Thursday, more information about the CENTCOM investigation by Republican members of Congress surfaced, suggesting that intelligence reports on ISIS from US Central Command were altered, making them overly optimistic. A congressional staff familiar with the report told CNN that CENTCOM senior leaders pushed for more favorable assessments of progress against ISIS. The congressional review was the result of a whistleblower claim that intelligence was altered between mid-2014 and mid-2015. CNN noted that differing views on ISIS were reported in March 2015, when then-CENTCOM commander General Lloyd Austin said, "we have significantly degraded his (ISIS) capability -- his ability to command and control his forces and also his primary sources of revenue, namely his oil refineries and his crude collection points. The fact is that he can no longer do what he did at the outset, which is to seize and to hold new territory. He has assumed a defensive crouch in Iraq." CNN reports that ten days later, CIA director John Brennan said : "ISIS is well-armed and well-financed. Its fighters are disciplined, committed, and battle-hardened. Left unchecked, the group would pose a serious danger not only to Syria and Iraq, but to the wider region and beyond, including the threat of attacks in the homelands of the United States and our partners." The 10-page congressional report, the result of a five-month investigation, is now expected to be released at the end of this week, according to The Daily Beast. The committee cannot punish officials for wrongdoing, but lawmakers could curtail funding for CENTCOM, The Daily Beast said. CENTCOM spokesman Commander Kyle Raines said the agency hadn't received the report and couldn't comment, CNN reported. Raines said : "We appreciate the independent oversight provided by the task force, cooperated fully with this investigation and encouraged personnel to speak freely with investigators and congressional staff members." ~~~~~~ Dear readers, I have to admit that I cannot understand why Hillary Clinton is not being tried for criminal acts related to her use of an unsecured secret email server. One explanation may be that she and Bill have so much negative information available about Barack Obama and other Democrat leaders that they are all afraid of what would be made public if they reject her and tell the Justice Department to begin proceedings. I also am at a loss to explain why the Democrat Party rank-and-file are so determined to elect her President -- even if they watch only mainstream media, they must have some idea of the depth of Hillary's depraved moral condition. Is it too much to ask Congress -- or at least the House -- to formally censure Hillary Clinton for her disregard of classified information while Secretary of State, and to censure FBI Director James Comey, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Barack Obama for their disregard for the rule of law as it relates to Hillary's classified information abuses. America is beginning to feel like Erdogan's Turkey.