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Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Bitzkrieg blog,

When it comes to the Clintons, where there’s smoke, there’s usually a structure fire. I doubt Haiti is any different.

With that in mind, I wanted to flag an article published earlier today at the BBC, What really happened with the Clintons in Haiti?

Here are some excerpts:

Donald Trump has said the work of Bill and Hillary Clinton in Haiti was a “disgrace”. What really happened?

 

“The Clinton family, they are crooks, they are thieves, they are liars,” says Haitian activist Dahoud Andre.

 

He has been leading protests outside the Clinton Foundation headquarters in Manhattan and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign base in Brooklyn for the last two years.

 

He said protesters from his small activist group, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, will continue to level their allegations – so far all unproven – if the Democratic candidate wins the White House.

 

Mrs Clinton retorted that she was proud of the foundation’s work, and pointed out her rival’s namesake charity had spent money on a lifesize portrait of himself.

 

The Clintons’ history with the world’s first black republic dates back to their 1975 honeymoon, when they met a voodoo priest and visited a hotel where Ernest Hemingway once stayed.

 

Mr Andre is not alone among his compatriots in blaming the once-and-perhaps-future first couple for a litany of ills in Haiti.

 

Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberte newspaper, told the BBC: “A lot of Haitians are not big fans of the Clintons, that’s for sure.”

 

“The fact the Clintons kind of took over things after the earthquake and did a pretty poor job of it translates to why the Haitians have a pretty dim view of them,” he added.

So what happened?

Mrs Clinton was Secretary of State and Mr Clinton was UN Special Envoy to Haiti when the January 2010 earthquake struck, killing an estimated 220,000 people.

 

Some $13.3bn (£10.9bn) was pledged by international donors for Haiti’s recovery.

 

Mr Clinton was appointed co-chairman of the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC), along with Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive.

 

But the IHRC found itself under fire as frustrations mounted at the slow pace of recovery.

 

Its mandate was not renewed by the Haitian parliament in 2011.

How about this graphic…

 

A US Government Accountability Office report discovered no hint of wrongdoing, but concluded the IHRC’s decisions were “not necessarily aligned with Haitian priorities”.

The GAO must have a peculiar definition of “wrongdoing.”

Mr Clinton’s own office at the UN found 9% of the foreign aid cash went to the Haitian government and 0.6% to local organizations.

 

The bulk of it went to UN agencies, international aid groups, private contractors and donor countries’ own civilian and military agencies.

 

For example, the Pentagon billed the State Department hundreds of millions of dollars for sending US troops to hand out bottled water and keep order on the streets of Haiti’s ravaged capital, Port-au-Prince.

 

Jake Johnston, an analyst with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan group that has studied the quake reconstruction, told the BBC “it’s hard to say it’s been anything other than a failure”.

 

But he believes the State Department and IHRC simply replicated the mistakes of the whole foreign aid industry by chasing short-term gains instead of building longer-term capacity on the ground.

 

“They relied too much on outside actors,” Mr Johnston says, “and supplanted the role of the Haitian government and domestic producers.”

 

After the earthquake, disaster capitalists flocked to the nation of 10 million people, which is about the size of the US state of Massachusetts.

 

Private contractors were eager to sell services, in what one US envoy described in a Wikileaks-disclosed diplomatic cable as a “gold rush”.

 

In email exchanges with top Clinton Foundation officials, a senior aide to Mrs Clinton, who was then-secretary of state, kept an eye out for those identified by the abbreviations “FOB” (friends of Bill Clinton) or “WJC VIPs” (William Jefferson Clinton VIPs).

 

“Need you to flag when people are friends of WJC,” wrote Caitlin Klevorick, a senior State Department official who was vetting incoming offers of assistance coming through the Clinton Foundation.

 

The emails, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Republican National Committee, have fuelled claims the Clintons were running a pay-to-play operation, though no hard evidence of this has emerged.

 

House Republicans are already laying the groundwork for a volley of congressional hearings into the Clinton Foundation in the event the Democratic candidate wins the White House in a week’s time.

 

Possibly the most enduring criticism of the Clinton Foundation’s work in Haiti stems from its signature project, a garment factory known as the Caracol Industrial Park.

 

The foundation, working with the Clinton State Department, helped arrange a US-subsidised deal with the Haitian government to build the $300m factory complex in 2012.

 

Several hundred farmers were evicted from their land to make way for the 600-acre manufacturing site, which produces clothes for retailers such as Old Navy, Walmart and Target.

 

South Korean textile giant Sae-A Trading Co, which is the main employer at the facility, subsequently donated between $50,000 to $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

 

Mr Clinton declared 100,000 jobs would be created “in short order”.

 

But the Caracol Industrial Park has created only 8,000 jobs.

 

In the Little Haiti neighbourhood of Miami that was visited by Mr Trump this September, the head of a local women’s advocacy group has questions for Mrs Clinton.

 

Marleine Bastien, executive director of Fanm Ayisyen Nan Miyami, believes that Clinton-backed projects have helped global investors more than they have benefited poverty-stricken Haitians.

 

She told the BBC: “The more Secretary Clinton refrains from responding to the concerns and questions from the people of Haiti, this perception that she’s trying to evade responding will continue.

 

“Instead of allowing these questions to linger and fester, why not come clean? The questions will not go away, they will continue.”

Come clean? This is the Clintons we’re talking about.

For more on the Clinton Foundation, see:

The Story of How the DOJ Tried to Thwart an FBI Investigation Into the Clinton Foundation

Video of the Day – Ralph Nader on the Clinton Foundation and ‘Pay to Play’

Wall Street Analyst Who Warned on GE Ahead of Crash Calls Clinton Foundation “Charity Fraud”

Exposed – The Clinton Foundation is Running a $20 Million Private Equity Firm in Colombia

How the Clinton Foundation Paid Sidney Blumenthal $10K per Month as He Gave Horrible Libya Advice to the State Dept.

How Donations to the Clinton Foundation Led to Tens of Billions in Weapons Sales to Autocratic Regimes

What Difference Does it Make? 1,100 Foreign Donors to Clinton Foundation Never Disclosed and Remain Secret

Senior Fellow at Sunlight Foundation Calls the Clinton Foundation “A Slush Fund”

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While the cost of US healthcare is often said to be “an arm and a leg”, thanks to this gentleman’s knife-wielding accident, America’s doctors bring a whole new meaning to the term being “given the finger…”

“The most bonkers medical bill I’ve ever received. Cut my finger chopping veggies, got a few stitches. Dr took 45 min, billed insurance $14k.”

h/t @odavis_

$14k for some stitches in a finger… well at least he paid his “fair share.”

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And the hits just keep on coming.

At the same time as the latest Wikileaks email dump revealed an email sent from the gmail account of DOJ assistant attorney general, Peter Kadzik, to the gmail account of John Podesta, warning him of a FOIA case that would make it “a while before the State Department posts the [Hillary] emails”, an off-the-record communication which the DOJ apparently had no complaints about, we learned of another coordinated, collusive event, this time involving not the Department of Justice, but the Secretary of State, the New York Times, and the Clinton campaign.

In an email dated March 1, 2015, just one day before the NYT’s story revealing that Hillary Clinton had a personal email server, a State Department official, Lauren Hickey, coordinated with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign staffers Heather Samuelson as well as Philippe Reines and Nick Merrill, on a statement given to The New York Times regarding how to frame its landmark story.

In the email also sent from the gmail account of State Department press aide Lauren Hickey (laurenashleyhickey@gmail.com), the government employee told Clinton aides that then-State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki had “just cleared” a statement to a New York Times reporter. Hickey attached the statement, which appeared to include a change made at the behest of the Clinton aides.

“Yes on your point re records – done below,” she wrote although it is unclear what change the Clinton campaign had requested.

Hi guys – Jen just cleared. She made the highlighted change — just rephrased a line about NARA updates state is undertaking. Yes on your point re records – done below. And yes will let you know — should be in the new few minutes.

The statement describes the State Department’s efforts to respond to document requests from the House Benghazi Committee, which uncovered the existence of Clinton’s server.

 “From the moment that the Select Committee was created, the State Department has been proactively and consistently engaged in responding to the Committee’s many requests in a timely manner, providing more than 40,000 pages of documents, scheduling more than 20 transcribed interviews and participating in several briefings and each of the Committee’s hearings.

One day after the exchange, the New York Times published its “groundbreaking”, if preapproved report revealing Clinton’s server to the public. A short time later, Hillary Clinton would announce her candidacy for president.

In a briefing Wednesday afternoon, State Department spokesman John Kirby declined to comment on the alleged leaked documents in a statement, but noted that “[providing] accurate information to the media and the public related to former Secretary Clinton’s emails… at times required communicating with her representatives to ensure accuracy.”

Stated simply, collusion happens.

To summarize: on the same day we obtained evidence of collusion between the Clinton campaign’s chairman, John Podesta, and one of the top-ranked staffers at the Justice Department, we also have confirmation of collusion between the State Department, the Clinton campaign and the New York Times.

Or, as president Obama put it, “an honest mistake.”

* * *

The email in question showing the coordinated effort between State, the NYT and the Clinton campaign is shown below.

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Submitted by Michael Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Mainstream media scrambles to cast Hillary as an innocent victim of FBI director James Comey’s decision to reopen the email case against her.

Andrew McCarthy at the National Review gets the story correct. McCarthy says Comey Is Not the One Whose Unorthodox Actions Are Casting a Cloud over the Election.

How rich of Hillary Clinton to complain now that FBI director James Comey is threatening the democratic process by commenting publicly about a criminal investigation on the eve of an election. Put aside that Comey did not say a single thing last week that implicates Clinton in a crime. The biggest coup for Clinton in the waning months of the campaign has been Comey’s decision not to prosecute her — a decision outside the responsibilities of the FBI director and publicly announced in a manner that contradicts law-enforcement protocols. There has been nothing more irregular, nothing that put law enforcement more in the service of politics, than that announcement. Yet, far from condemning it, Mrs. Clinton has worn it like a badge of honor since July. Indeed, she has contorted it into a wholesale exoneration, which it most certainly was not.

 

Just to remind those whose memories seem so conveniently to fail, Comey is the FBI director, not a Justice Department prosecutor, much less the attorney general. The FBI is not supposed to exercise prosecutorial discretion. The FBI is not supposed to decide whether the subject of a criminal investigation gets indicted. The FBI, moreover, is not obligated to make recommendations about prosecution at all; its recommendations, if it chooses to make them, are not binding on the Justice Department; and when it does make recommendations, it does so behind closed doors, not on the public record.

 

Yet, in the Clinton e-mails investigation, it was Comey who made the decision not to indict Clinton. Comey, furthermore, made the decision in the form of a public recommendation. In effect, it became The Decision because Attorney General Loretta Lynch had disgraced herself by furtively meeting with Mrs. Clinton’s husband a few days before Comey announced his recommendation. Comey, therefore, gave Mrs. Clinton a twofer: an unheard-of public proclamation that she should not be indicted by the head of the investigative agency; and a means of taking Lynch off the hook, which allowed the decision against prosecution to be portrayed as a careful weighing of evidence rather than a corrupt deal cooked up in the back of a plane parked on a remote tarmac. Now, suddenly, Mrs. Clinton is worried about law-enforcement interference in politics.

 

There is a very good argument — I would say, an irrefutable argument — that Comey should never have pronounced that the Clinton e-mails investigation was closed (in fact, it would have been appropriate if he had made no public statement about the investigation at all). But having made that pronouncement — which, again, Mrs. Clinton was thankful to have and which she has ceaselessly exploited — he was obliged by law-enforcement principles to amend it when it was no longer true.

 

The Clinton camp is in no position to cry foul about anything. In announcing his recommendation against indictment, Comey not only gave Clinton the benefit of every doubt (preposterously so when one reads the FBI’s reports). He also based his decision primarily on his legal analysis of a criminal statute, which is far removed from the responsibilities of the FBI.

 

As for the election, Mrs. Clinton is under the cloud of suspicion not because of Comey but because of her own egregious misconduct. She had no right to know back in July whether the investigation was closed. She has no right to know it now. Like any other criminal suspect, she simply has to wait . . . and wonder . . . and worry.

 

There were other worthy Democrats, but the party chose to nominate the subject of a criminal investigation. That is the Democrats’ own recklessness; Jim Comey is not to blame. And if the American people are foolish enough to elect an arrantly corrupt and compromised subject of a criminal investigation as our president, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

Reflections on Partisan Cheerleading

I do not play partisan cheerleading politics in these matters. Rather, I state my beliefs.

Hillary has only herself to blame.

Similarly, Donald Trump totally blew the first debate. I said so immediately following that debate. It took one hell of a partisan analysis to think the debate was anything but a total disaster. Yet, I received numerous emails telling me Trump won.

Had Trump not blown the first debate, or had Comey done what he should have done in the first place, this election would be over.

Meanwhile, the evidence against Hillary mounts.

One Swing State

Once again, and at the last minute, this election may come down to a one swing state differential.

The setup now is quite similar to the setup heading into the first debate. Trump needs all the must-win states plus one more. He cannot afford any mistakes now.

Realistically, I still have Hillary ahead if the election were held today. One week from now, that story may look different.

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By EconMatters

We delve into the EIA Oil Report, which was an inline report overall, the only thing that stood out like a sore thumb, was an unusually large import number that came out of nowhere, and doesn`t match historical patterns.

This sure seems like a blatant attempt to negatively influence the EIA Report as opposed to merely a scheduling error. Refiners operating during the maintenance season with an 85% capacity utilization rate don`t schedule Summer Driving Season level of Oil Imports for this time of year.

Given the price action in Oil leading up to this number, it seems suspicious like someone knew the number well in advance with 100% certainty, that they were getting an outsized number. Especially given that the rest of the EIA Report was solid, nothing abnormal for this time of year, the only way someone could have this level of confidence is if they were making the number happen.

This smells like an example of someone utilizing their physical storage bandwidth capacity to make a guaranteed EIA Result happen through logistics management/manipulation of the physical which they profited from immensely in the paper, electronic market.

It is pretty easy to investigate just pull the trading records for the last 10 days, and see if there are matches to import shipments/Oil Tanker Offload manifests for the pertinent EIA Reporting week.

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Associated Press reporter Matt Lee has once again exposed the ignorance and propaganda spewing of the State Deparment as spokesman John Kirby struggled Tuesday when he debated over the number of Asian countries that are now aligning with China instead of the United States.

As The Washington Free Beacon's Jack Heretik reports, after Malaysia signed multiple new deals with China this week, including the purchase of ships and a railroad line, questions began to swirl if Malaysia was aligning more with China. The Philippines announced last month its intention to forge closer ties with China and move away from the U.S.

“I don’t want to get too conceptual here, but what do you mean it’s not born out by the facts that countries in greater numbers in Southeast Asia are becoming friendlier with China?” Lee asked at the State Department daily press briefing.

 

“I mean it’s completely born out by the facts.”

 

“Name them,” Kirby said.

 

“Well, the Philippines for one,” Lee said before reciting a list that included Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Malaysia.

 

“Okay, so we have two or three, four, whatever,” Kirby said. “There’s a lot of nations in the Asian-Pacific region.”

 

“There’s only ten in ASEAN,” Lee said.

ASEAN, an acronym for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, is a regional economic organization that seeks to promote better coordination between the ten member states. All five of the countries that Lee mentioned are ASEAN members.

Kirby then said he did not deny that countries were reaching out more to China but said it was not a bad development for the United States.

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In an unexpected flip-flop, just two days after White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that “President Obama doesn’t think Comey tried to influence the election”  and that “Obama still believes Comey has good character”, the US president – who has expressly stated that he doesn’t wan’t to look like he is meddling – on Wednesday changed his tune, when he unleashed criticism addressed at FBI Director James Comey’s disclosure of the Bureau’s new probe into Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

In his first public comments on the decision, Obama told NowThis News he did not want to interfere with the investigation. Yet, he did just that when he said it’s important that the public’s judgment not be colored by incomplete information, hinting that the reopening of the FBI probe should not influence voter decisions, even though it would mark the first time a candidate could become president pending an active FBI investigation, with potential criminal consequences.

“I do think that there is a norm that when there are investigations, we don’t operate on innuendo,” Obama said in the interview published Wednesday. “We don’t operate on incomplete information. We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.” 

Obama took a more pointed tone than his press secretary, Josh Earnest, who said previously that the White House did not have an official position on Mr. Comey’s decision. Mr. Earnest referred to the Justice Department guidelines, however, and said, “The president believes that it’s important for those guidelines and norms to be followed.”

We spoke with President Obama about the FBI’s recent investigation into emails related to Hillary Clinton http://pic.twitter.com/3ivMp2TfVi

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) November 2, 2016

The president did not mention the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, but it was clear Mr. Obama was referring to him. Declaring that he had “made a very deliberate effort to make sure that I don’t look like I’m meddling in what are supposed to be independent processes for making these assessments,” Mr. Obama nonetheless expressed confidence in Mrs. Clinton.

“I trust her,’’ he said. “I know her. And I wouldn’t be supporting her if I didn’t have absolute confidence in her integrity and her interest in making sure that young people have a better future.’’

Obama also noted that Comey himself decided not to recommend criminal charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information on her private email server while secretary of State.  

“When this was investigated thoroughly the last time, the conclusion … was that, you know, she made some mistakes but that there wasn’t anything there that was, you know, prosecutable,” Obama said.

With the FBI’s decision dominating the airwaves, Clinton and other top Democrats have slammed Comey for being vague about how exactly, the messages, discovered in an unrelated investigation of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), the estranged husband of Clinton aide Huma Abedin were linked to the Clinton email investigation. Comey has endured a firestorm of criticism after he sent a letter to Congress last Friday saying that his agency was probing messages that could be linked to the investigation into Clinton’s server. The disclosure, made less than two weeks before Election Day, boosted the campaign of Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Democrats have also said Comey is violating Justice Department policy against making investigative decisions that could be seen as influencing the outcome of an election. 

Obama would not say specifically whether he believed Comey did so.  “Well, you know, I’ve made a very deliberate effort to make sure that I don’t look like I’m meddling in what are supposed to be independent processes for making these assessments,” the president said, as he meddled.

White House officials later downplayed Mr. Obama’s remarks about the F.B.I. and insisted he had not meant to criticize Mr. Comey.

“The president went out of his way to say he wouldn’t comment on any particular investigations,” Eric Schultz, a White House spokesman, told reporters on Air Force One while Obama was en route to North Carolina to campaign for Hillary Clinton. Schultz characterized Obama’s remarks as mirroring those made in recent days by the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, who had said that while the White House would not criticize Comey’s decision to update Congress on the status of an ongoing investigation, Obama believed that rules intended to keep such investigations confidential were good ones and should be followed.

Obama also called the controversy surrounding her email server overblown.  

“The fact of the matter is that Hillary Clinton, having been in the arena for 30 years, oftentimes gets knocked around and people say crazy stuff about her,” he said. “And when she makes a mistake, an honest mistake, it ends up being blown up as if it’s just some crazy thing.”

And that is what, to Obama, the five ongoing FBI investigations surrounding virtually everyone in Hillary’s inner circle, boil down to: “an honest mistake.“

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Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

I’ve been traveling for the past ten days with a group of friends, one of whom is a highly accomplished entrepreneur.

I’ll call him Michael to keep things simple.

Several years ago Michael started an automated domain business that used special software to buy domains, find the most likely buyer, and then sell them.

As a simple example, Michael’s custom software would buy, say, XYZ.com.

Then it would scan online domain records to determine the most likely buyer of that domain… perhaps the owner of XYZ.net.

His software would then send that person an email offering them XYZ.com at a pre-determined price.

If the prospective buyer accepted, he or she could click on a link in the email and purchase XYZ.com.

The beauty of Michael’s business was that it was almost 100% automated; his software was able to do just about everything without the need for human involvement.

Michael’s business was a huge success, and his software sold countless domains over the years.

But he told me the most incredible story a few days ago.

Recently someone brought legal action against him, claiming to have been victimized by a phishing attack that originated from one of Michael’s domains.

(Phishing is a scam where hackers build an official-looking website to bait you into providing personal data like a Social Security Number or bank account password.)

It’s true, Michael did own the domain… for about 30 minutes… in 2009.

After that Michael sold the domain to someone else, after which it was resold again and again until, finally, in 2015, the then-owner of the domain used it to engage in phishing attacks.

So Michael was being blamed for a phishing attack that occurred six years after he sold a domain that he had only owned for about 30 minutes.

Any rational person would step back and say “OK, Michael couldn’t have possibly been the hacker. Maybe instead we should find out who owned the domain at the time of the actual attack.”

Michael contacted the claimant’s legal team, showed them his proof, and tried to reason with them. But the lawyers wouldn’t budge.

Attorneys know that they can bring a lawsuit against anybody for any reason, even when it is completely baseless and without grounds.

They also know that, for most people, the prospect of being sued is terrifying… not to mention incredibly expensive.

Even if they haven’t done anything wrong, most people will settle and make the problem go away rather than risk a prolonged and uncertain court battle.

The judicial process is so draining and time consuming that even if you win, you still lose.

Those lawyers took one look at Michael and saw a successful person who could afford to settle, so they went after him.

It’s basically blackmail… but it has sadly become a cornerstone of the phony justice system in the Land of the Free.

It’s also a reflection of modern social values. Success used to be admired. Now it’s viewed with suspicion and derision.

After all, in the words of the President of the United States, “you didn’t build that…”

Success also puts a target on your back– lawsuits, taxes, etc.

The more successful you become, the more the system tries to take it away from you. These are entirely the wrong incentives if you want a prosperous society.

By the way, this is not a risk that only affects the super wealthy.

Never forget that if you pay any tax at all, you’re already richer than 50% of your fellow countrymen.

Or if you have a net worth that’s above zero, you’re already wealthier than your government.

Sure, it’s possible that you may go your entire life without any legal trouble. And if so, congratulations.

But it’s dangerous to dismiss such an obvious risk, especially if you live in the most frivolously litigious country that’s ever existed in the history of the world.

If you ever do run into legal trouble, by then it will be too late to do something about it.

Any court in your country can put liens on your assets, garnish your wages, and even levy your bank account.

Why take the risk?

A good asset protection strategy is like putting ‘the club’ on your steering wheel.

There’s nothing that’s going to discourage a truly determined thief… but most of the time when they see how protected you are, they’ll just move on to an easier target.

For example, it’s possible to establish trusts and LLCs in certain jurisdictions (both foreign and domestic) whose laws make it very difficult for frivolous creditors to steal what you’ve worked so hard to build.

Ambulance-chasing attorneys know that it’s too costly and difficult to go after assets held in those types of structures, so, like a common thief, they’ll typically just move on to an easier target.

In addition to being a deterrent, a good asset protection strategy also reduces the impact in case that common thief actually does try to steal from you.

Holding some assets in a protected structure or location ensures that, even if a court seizes everything within its jurisdiction to satisfy a judgment against you, you’ll still have a rainy day fund set aside.

This is why people often buy a home in Florida, for example, which has laws ensuring that your primary dwelling cannot be seized.

There are countless attorneys who charge obscene amounts of money to structure a complex asset protection plan.

But most people don’t need to spend a dime.

In reality you can derive tremendous benefit from simple ideas that have minimal carrying costs– like keeping a rainy day fund in physical cash or gold, both of which can be held anonymously and privately.

It definitely makes sense to explore the options. After all, there’s very little downside in making it more difficult for frivolous claimants to steal from you.

Do you have a Plan B?

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