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Pardon Hillary!
President Obama, please.
In all seriousness, just say you forgive her for setting up her own email system outside the reach of FOIA.
However, any crime, hanky panky or shenanigans they contain or reveal is another matter. Corruption in office is unforgivable.
93 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
The Aspens -- a Forest, cloned from one tree, connected by their roots.
Scooter Libby, in an email to Steno Judy Miller of NYT:
"Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning," Mr. Libby wrote. "They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."
http://warisacrime.org/node/3677
Scooter got a pardon. Judy got a new job. Bush and Cheney walk free. How's Gov. Siegelman doing these days?
Scooter Libby, in an email to Steno Judy Miller of NYT:
"Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning," Mr. Libby wrote. "They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."
http://warisacrime.org/node/3677
Scooter got a pardon. Judy got a new job. Bush and Cheney walk free. How's Gov. Siegelman doing these days?
Response to Octafish (Reply #8)
Like Scooter Libby reminded Judy Miller, then an imprisoned NYT reporter, they're all connected underground.
Notice they're white where they show.
UBS is a Swiss bank that is enjoying better days, thanks to the US taxpayer and a number of key US political leaders.
Hillary Helps a Bank—and Then It Funnels Millions to the Clintons
The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.
by CONOR FRIEDERSDORF, The Atlantic, JUL 31, 2015
The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. The Wall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.
The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.
“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”
Then reporters James V. Grimaldi and Rebecca Ballhaus lay out how UBS helped the Clintons. “Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank,” they report. “The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.”
The article adds that “there is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton.” Maybe it’s all a mere coincidence, and when UBS agreed to pay Bill Clinton $1.5 million the relevant decision-maker wasn’t even aware of the vast sum his wife may have saved the bank or the power that she will potentially wield after the 2016 presidential election.
SNIP...
As McClatchy noted last month in a more broadly focused article that also mentions UBS, “Ten of the world’s biggest financial institutions––including UBS, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs––have hired Bill Clinton numerous times since 2004 to speak for fees totaling more than $6.4 million. Hillary Clinton also has accepted speaking fees from at least one bank. And along with an 11th bank, the French giant BNP Paribas, the financial goliaths also donated as much as $24.9 million to the Clinton Foundation––the family’s global charity set up to tackle causes from the AIDS epidemic in Africa to climate change.”
CONTINUED...
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/hillary-helps-a-bankand-then-it-pays-bill-15-million-in-speaking-fees/400067/
About UBS Wealth Management
It's Buy Partisan
After his exit from the US Senate, Phil Gramm found a job at Swiss bank UBS as vice chairman. He later brought on former President Bill Clinton. What a coincidence, they are the two key figures in repealing Glass-Steagal. Since the New Deal it was the financial regulation that protected the US taxpayer from the Wall Street casino. Oh well, what's a $16 trillion bailout among friends?
It's a Buy-Partisan Who's Who:
President William J. Clinton
President George W. Bush Heh heh heh.
Robert J. McCann
James Carville
John V. Miller
Paula D. Polito
Anthony Roth
Mike Ryan
John Savercool
SOURCE: http://financialservicesinc.ubs.com/revitalizingamerica/SenatorPhilGramm.html
One of my attorney chums doesn't like to see his name on any committees, event letterhead or political campaign literature. These folks, it seems to me, are past caring.
Some of why DUers and ALL voters should care about Phil Gramm.
The fact the nation's "news media" hasn't really followed this story should also be of great concern as the world is a very small oyster for the wealthy as it is. Imagine what one could do combined with the powers of the Department of State?
To me, Obama has been strangely neutral. Especially considering how he treats whistleblowers who expose government criminality.
...but you could be right.
What are friends for?
That didn't disqualify his Dim Son, in the minds of American voters and those who pay them to think that way.
Reagan was shot in March 1981 and for all intents and purposes was a walking vegetable afterward.
Through a Glass Darkly
Alexander Cockburn
Lies Of Our Times (p. 12-13)
November 1991
What was surprising to me was Reagan’s condition. He was exhausted to the point of incoherence throughout much ofthe interview and could not remember the substance of any subject that had been discussed apart from Mitterrand’s expression of anticommunism. I had not seen Reagan at such close rangesince the assassination attempt nearly four months earlier, and was shocked at his condition.... Reagan simply was unable to recall the contents of the talks in which he had just participated.... The interview concluded at a signal from Deaver,who did not seem to find the president’s condition unusual.”
Thus ran Lou Cannon’s recollections of an interview with the Commander-in-Chief in 1981, as set forth in his book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster,1991), published earlier this year. But how did Cannon describe Reagan’s condition to the readers of the Washington Post when he wrote up his interview? In the July 23, 1981, Washington Post,Cannon’s story appeared under the headline “Reagan Describes Summit Meeting as ‘Worth Its Weight in Gold.’ ” Cannon’s report gives the impression of a lucid chief executive returning home after a fruitful colloquy with other western leaders at the economic summit held in Ottawa in mid-July. Cannon did mention in the tenth paragraph that “Reagan appeared tired to the point of near-exhaustion,” but this observation was quickly qualified by the opinion of “aides” that the president had been doing a lot of prep for the conference and was also worried about the Middle East.
Cannon shared his brief session with Reagan aboard Air Force One with Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, who similarly gave his readers the impression of a president in touch with things rather than the incoherent old man they had actually encountered. As did Cannon, Smith wove the few quotable remarks from Reagan into a tapestry of attributed presidential dicta passed on — and no doubt confected— by Meese, Deaver,and Speakes. It is clear from Cannon’s account of the conference itself that Reagan was fogged up throughout the actual conference, occasionally interjecting trivial observations or homely jokes into the proceedings and then relapsing into bemused silence. Cannon’s memoir is one more indication of the cover-up that took place in the wake of Hinckley’s assassination bid on March 30, 1981. At the time of the shooting, the press was full of phrases like “bouncing back,” “iron constitution,” and other terms indicating that Reagan had emerged from the ordeal in good shape. In fact Reagan very nearly died on the operating table and was a dotard afterwards. He never fully recovered.
Conclusion: Unless a president is actually dead, the WhiteHouse press corps can be relied upon to present him as both sentient and sapient, no matter how decrepit his physical and mental condition.
SOURCE in PDF form:
http://liesofourtimes.org/public_html/1991/Nov1991%20V2%20N10/Nov1991%20V2%20N10.pdf
Alexander Cockburn
Lies Of Our Times (p. 12-13)
November 1991
What was surprising to me was Reagan’s condition. He was exhausted to the point of incoherence throughout much ofthe interview and could not remember the substance of any subject that had been discussed apart from Mitterrand’s expression of anticommunism. I had not seen Reagan at such close rangesince the assassination attempt nearly four months earlier, and was shocked at his condition.... Reagan simply was unable to recall the contents of the talks in which he had just participated.... The interview concluded at a signal from Deaver,who did not seem to find the president’s condition unusual.”
Thus ran Lou Cannon’s recollections of an interview with the Commander-in-Chief in 1981, as set forth in his book President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster,1991), published earlier this year. But how did Cannon describe Reagan’s condition to the readers of the Washington Post when he wrote up his interview? In the July 23, 1981, Washington Post,Cannon’s story appeared under the headline “Reagan Describes Summit Meeting as ‘Worth Its Weight in Gold.’ ” Cannon’s report gives the impression of a lucid chief executive returning home after a fruitful colloquy with other western leaders at the economic summit held in Ottawa in mid-July. Cannon did mention in the tenth paragraph that “Reagan appeared tired to the point of near-exhaustion,” but this observation was quickly qualified by the opinion of “aides” that the president had been doing a lot of prep for the conference and was also worried about the Middle East.
Cannon shared his brief session with Reagan aboard Air Force One with Hedrick Smith of the New York Times, who similarly gave his readers the impression of a president in touch with things rather than the incoherent old man they had actually encountered. As did Cannon, Smith wove the few quotable remarks from Reagan into a tapestry of attributed presidential dicta passed on — and no doubt confected— by Meese, Deaver,and Speakes. It is clear from Cannon’s account of the conference itself that Reagan was fogged up throughout the actual conference, occasionally interjecting trivial observations or homely jokes into the proceedings and then relapsing into bemused silence. Cannon’s memoir is one more indication of the cover-up that took place in the wake of Hinckley’s assassination bid on March 30, 1981. At the time of the shooting, the press was full of phrases like “bouncing back,” “iron constitution,” and other terms indicating that Reagan had emerged from the ordeal in good shape. In fact Reagan very nearly died on the operating table and was a dotard afterwards. He never fully recovered.
Conclusion: Unless a president is actually dead, the WhiteHouse press corps can be relied upon to present him as both sentient and sapient, no matter how decrepit his physical and mental condition.
SOURCE in PDF form:
http://liesofourtimes.org/public_html/1991/Nov1991%20V2%20N10/Nov1991%20V2%20N10.pdf
Mentally isn't physically. So he remained VP and used the opportunity to get appointed a Super Duper Presidential Helper.
George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of ‘Counter-Terrorism’
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
SNIP...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
[font color="green"]The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified.[/font color] The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
So that's how the rich got richer and the rest of found happiness through austerity. And friends of Poppy got ahead for ever and ever.
Old story for you, OF. Shocker for those who can pull themselves away from their smartphone or the chocolate desert fountain at Golden Corral.
